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CHRISTIANITY 
WHICH WAY? 


Re ify 





CHRISTIANITY 
WHICH WAYvr 


A HISTORICAL STUDY OF 

CHANGES AND ACHIEVE- 

MENTS IN THE CHRISTIAN 
CHURCH 


BY ; 
REV. CHARLES SPARROW NICKERSON, D.D. 


And if it bear fruit, well. And if not, 
then after that thou shalt cut it down. 
Luke 13:9 





THE CENTURY CO. 
New York and London 


Copyright, 1925, by 


Ture CENTURY Co. 


PRINTED IN U. S. A. 


Dedicated to 


LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE, OF THOUGHT 
AND OF SPEECH 


in all matters of religion; in the belief 
that only as we claim this liberty for our- 
selves and grant it to others can we 
ever reach such clear convictions as 
our Master intended us to have 


AND TO THE HONORED MEMORY OF 


WILLIAM SPARROW 


two hundred and sixty-ninth recorded 
victim of the wpersecutions under 
Queen Mary; who for his unswerving 
faith in Jesus Christ and his courageous 
testimony suffered death by fire in 
Smithfield, London, November 18, 1557 


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CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 


INTRODUCTORY: THe CHURCH MILITANT . 


I. Tue CHurRcH COURAGEOUS . 
II. Tue CHurcH IMPERIAL . 
III. THe CHurcu Divipep 


IV. THe CHurcH EXPECTANT 


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THE CHURCH MILITANT 


Ecclesiastical history is to a large extent the history 


of corruptions. 
JOHN STOUGHTON. 


The preliminary step to following Christ is to leave the 


dead to bury their dead. 
RoBert BROWNING. 


Sit down before a fact as a little child. Be prepared 
to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly 
wherever and into whatever abysses nature leads, or you 


shall learn nothing. 
HUvxtey, in a letter to Charles Kingsley. 


All errors flow into human society from one source, 
namely the burial by men in oblivion of the life, the pre- 
cepts and the lessons of Jesus Christ, and their neglecting 


to apply the same to the actions of every day. 
Pope BENEDICT XV. 


I have lived, sir, a long time. The longer I live the 
more convincing proofs I see that God governs in the af- 
fairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground 
without his notice, is it probable that an empire can arise 
without his aid? 

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, in moving that the meetings 
of the Constitutional Convention be opened with 
prayer. 


The church did not attain maturity at the Nicene Coun- 
cil. Augustine was not the highest achievement of the 
Christian faith. The Protestant Reformation did not in- 
troduce the Golden Age. A church that is not growing 
in grace is a dead church. A theology that is not pro- 
gressive is bed-ridden. The church needs a greater Refor- 
mation than it has yet enjoyed. The grace of God will 
reveal itself at no distant day in vastly greater richness 
and fulness, for the sanctification of the Christian church, 
the preparation of the Bride for her Bridegroom. 

CHARLES Aucustus Briaas. 


CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


INTRODUCTORY 


THE CHURCH MILITANT 


INCE the introduction of Christianity 
there have been many times when it could 

be said that a discussion of religious problems 
was of interest to nobody outside the active 
membership of churches. To understand why 
this is not the case at present, we must call 
attention to the fact that the Christian religion 
exists in three very distinct forms or manifes- 
tations. This faith arose centuries ago among 
a people who already had a religion. In those 
days every nation had its own religion. The 
worship of some kind of deity was as much a 
part of the common, daily life of the people as 
their patriotism or their sense of family re- 
lationship. The Roman, the pagan, the He- 


brew, each accepted his traditional faith as he 
3 


4 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


accepted his race, his language, or his name. 
His religion not only bound his interests to an 
invisible world, but separated him from what 
he regarded as an inferior part of this world. 
Incidentally his religion inculeated some ideas 
and principles of behavior, but, except in the 
case of the Hebrews, these moral precepts were 
secondary. Even among the Hebrews they 
were not looked upon as really obligatory when 
dealing with strangers. 

Into this world, and into the part of it that 
had this best of the racial traditions, there came 
a teacher with an entirely new idea of religion. 
To him it was not a matter of race or custom or 
language, but of pure love to God and good 
will to our fellow-men. We have certain duties 
of a special character to our own homes and 
people and nation, but these must never make 
us the enemy of the stranger because he is a 
stranger. This new prophet taught that God 
has made of one blood all who dwell upon the 
earth, and that God revealed himself specially 
to the Hebrew to make the Hebrew not the ex- 
ploiter but the benefactor of all men. These 
principles are such commonplaces to us that it 


THE CHURCH MILITANT 4) 


is only by an effort we can realize with what 
puzzled incredulity they were received at first, 
even by the intimate friends of Jesus. The 
idea that we must not make war upon a stranger 
when we learn that his forefathers warred with 
ours centuries ago, upset all previous ideas of 
religious obligation. His god and ours were 
continually at war; how else could we please 
our god? ‘To find such a stranger wounded 
and dying by the roadside and to nurse him 
back to life was to sin against our own people. 
It made the enemy stronger by one man, and 
- wasted good wine and oil and twopence that 
might be used to fortify Samaria. That 
was patriotism and religion before Christ 
came into the world. It is yet, in some 
quarters. 

It is not because of its moral superiority 
alone that we put Christianity among religions 
in a class entirely by itself. It stands alone, 
with no comparison in kind with any other 
faith. The first disciples went out to preach 
this faith not to people whose minds were a 
religious blank, for there were none of that kind 
anywhere, but to people who already had re- 


6 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


ligions. This was the first of the three forms 
in which Christianity was preached. We may 
call it Apostolic Christianity, using the word 
with no reference to theological beliefs. Man- 
kind was divided into just two parts, with 
reference to Christ, and the condition of this 
division was personal faith in him. There 
was nothing else to distract. the attention. 
Those who had accepted Christ were in the 
church. They never thought of living a 
Christian life in any other way. Those who 
had never heard of Christ, or, having heard, 
had rejected or refused or had not yet decided, 
were not in the church nor connected with it 
in any capacity whatever. There was no 
middle ground, or possibility of confusing 
one’s Christian relationship. This condition 
is found nowhere to-day except in foreign 
mission territory. 

In course of time the Christian faith passed 
into another stage or form which we may call 
Imperialistic Christianity, from the fact that 
it is so closely associated with the Roman Em- 
pire. It reached out in the direction of a 
racial religion, so far as such a conception 


THE CHURCH MILITANT vf 


could be reconciled with Christian teaching at 
all. Certain nations had adopted Christianity 
in the place of their own ancestral faiths. In 
such nations the church drifted into the old 
and familiar way of treating the entire citizen- 
ship as entitled to all religious privileges and 
immunities, whether they ever had made any- 
thing like a personal choice of Christ, as the 
Apostles had demanded, or not. We cannot 
enter here into a discussion of the theological 
bearings of this belief. We call attention only 
to the historical fact, that endured in all 
Christendom for more than a thousand years. 
An idea very much like this, though not quite 
the same, still holds in the larger part of 
Christendom. 

At the Protestant Reformation in the six- 
teenth century the progressive part of Western 
Christendom broke away from Rome, but not 
from the racial church idea. The early Prot- 
estant churches were distinctly national. 
There was more or less of emphasis put upon 
personal religion and the definite consecration 
of the believer to Christ. But until the Puritan 
movement in the following century there was 


8 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


no real effort to return to the Apostolic condi- 
tion of making one’s Christianity depend not 
upon his citizenship in a nominally Christian 
land and a mere formal instruction in accord- 
ance with such citizenship, but upon his definite 
choice of Christ and his profession of that faith. 
It was impossible, of course, for the seven- 
teenth century to restore first-century condi- 
tions and the actual New Testament church. 
But the Puritan did succeed in drawing an 
Apostolic distinction between being a Christian 
and being a respectable member of society. 
This is the Puritan’s real bequest to subse- 
quent generations. With all the changes that 
have come in the past two centuries, and the 
obliterating of old landmarks, we here in 
America have kept this difference between 
Christian and near-Christian clearly in our 
minds. Even in those cases where people 
have cast off all the stricter ideas of religion 
that we associate with the word ‘‘Puritan,’’ 
they still draw a clear line between the man 
who reverently holds to what he considers to 
be Christian truths, and the man who ridicules 


THE CHURCH MILITANT 9 


or opposes Christianity, or claims to live in 
absolute independence of it. 

Along with Protestantism and Puritanism 
there has come sectarianism, and the three to- 
gether have built up what we may call Modern 
Christianity. This development of the faith, 
which holds the key of the future in its hands, 
has been profoundly influenced by its environ- 
ment. It seems to be a law of nature that mix- 
ture of blood gives strength, and especially 
when combined with the natural sifting of 
emigrant peoples by the transfer to new sur- 
roundings of their most enterprising elements. 
All great nations have been to some extent 
composite, and have developed in almost every 
instance upon land that was not originally their 
own. Now the greatest nation of them all has 
arisen,—entirely immigrant and a score of 
times more composite than any other race that 
ever lived. At the very beginning of its career 
this nation was committed to two principles 
that have everything to do with the future of 
Christianity. It repudiated at once and com- 
pletely the race idea of religion. The sepa- 


10 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


ration of church and state, and liberty to wor- 
ship God according to the dictates of conscience, 
are fundamental principles with us and never 
will be changed. And in the second place, 
largely by the circumstances of its early his- 
tory, the moral characteristics of the American 
people have a distinct trend toward Puritan- 
ism, though the purely dogmatic features of 
this type of formal religion have been greatly 
changed. As an illustration we may mention 
our unprecedented experiment of controlling 
by a fundamental law of the whole land 
one of the oldest and greatest enemies of the 
human race, intemperance. We have our 
faults, but no complete estimate of the Ameri- 
can character can be made that minimizes its 
strong substratum of moral conviction. 

One very prominent feature of this phase 
of religion that we have called Modern, as 
distinct from Apostolic and Imperialistic 
Christianity, particularly noticeable here in 
America, is the constantly widening division 
between Christian life and church life. We 
are not preaching, as the Apostles did, to pagan 
people or to Hebrews who knew of God but 


THE CHURCH MILITANT 11 


had no knowledge of Christian revelation. 
We are preaching to people who have been 
brought up in a civilization from which it would 
be as impossible to separate Christian ideas 
as it would be to put away geography, history, 
or natural science. Some of our hearers out- 
side the church membership have better and 
higher ideas of Christian truths than many 
who are holding official positions in the church, 
and their manner of daily living is more re- 
spected by their neighbors. It is a delicate 
and peculiar situation, particularly noticeable 
in large city parishes and educational centers, 
but more or less in evidence everywhere. Very 
many of these people do not regard themselves 
as entirely separate from the Christian body, 
but for reasons that are mainly local and per- 
sonal they are out of sympathy with church 
life of the kind they know. Some of them say, 
like Abraham Lincoln, that they are waiting 
for the church to bring its requirements for 
membership more into accord with the things 
that Christ demands for discipleship. 

It would be most unjust to this unorganized 
and unregistered conviction to charge these 


12 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


people with the attempt to evade a recognized 
duty, or to put forth a claim of intellectual 
superiority. Most of them frankly admit that 
their position is not consistent. They say 
they ought to be somewhere, but declare that 
they do not know where they belong. They 
are appealed to by dozens of denominational 
bodies, each claiming to have the only real 
gospel and to maintain the only right Christian 
practice. Unless one has a very strong secta- 
rian bias he is apt to obtain from all this con- 
troversy nothing more definite than a general 
conviction that none of them is right. And 
conscientious people are finding it more and 
more repellent to all their best and noblest 
ideas of religion to think of deciding a matter 
of real importance by inherited bias or appeal 
to prejudice of any kind. A hundred years 
ago people could settle such questions by listen- 
ing to the arguments pro and con—there were 
plenty of opportunities in those days—and 
making up their minds. Those were the days 
of individualism in religion, when every man 
of any brains at all flattered himself that he 
was something of a theologian. It is not the 


THE CHURCH MILITANT 13 


case to-day. The modern intelligent hearer 
has come into a very different way of think- 
ing. He has no confidence in sectarian dispu- 
tation. He insists that no layman ought to be 
expected to decide questions that are outside 
his province and beyond the means of investi- 
gation possessed by any but specialists. He 
declares that it is the business of the church 
either to decide such matters in a rational man- 
ner if they are vital parts of religion, or if 
they are not vital parts of it the church should 
say so and put them entirely out of the way. 
These are the real problems that face us 
to-day. We cannot escape them by saying 
that it is easy enough to find fault with the 
church, and by insisting that if there are 
superior people outside they should come in 
where they belong and thus help to raise the 
standard. Unquestionably the church is an 
essential institution, and needs the support of 
all the best elements in the community. With- 
out the church of past centuries, we should be 
in heathenism still, as our ancestors were. 
Without the church of to-day, no intelligent 
student of sociology can question that our 


14 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


boasted civilization would probably endure 
only long enough for science to invent still 
more deadly poisons and explosives. But at 
the same time there can be no doubt in the mind 
of any one who is in the midst of Christian 
work to-day with open eyes and ears that 
the church has laid itself open to criticism and 
deserves most of what it is getting. It is the 
accredited teacher of religion. It has had four 
hundred years of very dear bought liberty in 
which to find out what it believes. The old 
sectarian arguments led nowhere, they are 
leading nowhere to-day, and they never can 
bring light at any future time. Why are they 
kept up? Why must the most important work 
that man has ever undertaken in all his history 
be checked and hindered for all time by such 
utter childishness as the ordinary and familiar 
kinds of denominational controversy? And 
any one who is at all familiar with modern 
conditions knows that sectarianism, bad as it 
is, after all is not the only evil by which the 
modern church is deprived of the support and 
active help of a very large part of the actual 
Christianity surrounding it. Is it worth its 


THE CHURCH MILITANT 15 


while for the modern church to ask what are 
the causes of this condition, or is it best 
to continue its historic policy of each one per 
cent in it claiming that it cannot be mistaken, 
and that all must come to its exact standard 
of belief or go unsaved? 

Our purpose is to present a brief study of 
certain periods in church history that bear 
directly upon modern religious problems. We 
wish to show that the church in past days has 
been willing to introduce changes, sometimes 
of a revolutionary character, in order to fit it- 
self for more effective presentation of the gos- 
pel in the conditions and circumstances of that 
particular time. What we wish to do in 
preaching the gospel to-day is to present our 
historic faith in such form and manner as will 
appeal to the modern intelligence and the 
modern conscience as compulsively as former 
upward movements in the church appealed to 
the intelligence and the conscience of their 
day. The church has never greatly advanced 
except by a rediscovery of what Christ’s mes- 
sage to the world can mean. Such a redis- 
covery, greater than any previous one, is 


16 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


provided for by the marvelous advance in 
scriptural study and interpretation made pos- 
sible in recent years. 

At the very beginning of our inquiry we 
must clear away certain misunderstandings that 
happen to be just now farther to the front than 
any real importance of their own would or- 
dinarily warrant. Religion is naturally con- 
servative, and when anything goes wrong many 
people jump to the conclusion that all our 
troubles come to us because we have drifted 
away from the safe foundations, and the thing 
to do is to restore the old faith. Assuming 
that anybody really knows what the old faith 
is, 1t would not be possible to restore it. If 
the present generation could be transferred 
magically back into the humanity of the seven- 
teenth century, it is possible we might be able 
to think again in terms of their religion. As 
things are, however, if we are to think at all 
we must be content to do so under the limi- 
tations of the present hour. We have certain 
historic creeds and theologies. They are 
the framework of our standardized religious 
thought. When the intelligent faith of our 


THE CHURCH MILITANT 17 


time, for sufficient reasons, changes its view 
of some small detail of the creed, we do not 
throw away the creed, any more than we 
abolish one of our natural sciences at every 
new discovery of truth. We make room in the 
science for the new fact, as soon as we are 
satisfied that it is a fact. Wedo the same with 
our religious belief. Now and then in history 
it has come to pass that the creed became so 
radically changed they had to make a new one, 
but where the church has done this once it 
has changed details in its creed a thousand 
times. There is no other rational and sensible 
thing for the church to do. 

We honor the great religious leaders of the 
past, but we do not consider ourselves abso- 
lutely bound to repeat the exact terms of their 
religious thinking, and certainly not the exact 
details of their practice. It is clear that many 
of those men, the wisest Christians of their 
age, really believed themselves to be at the goal 
of all true knowledge in religion. They write 
as if the Bible had been waiting all through 
the centuries for them to be born, in order to 
give an interpretation of it to the world that 


18 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


would never need to be changed. Kven where 
they made no such claims themselves, they 
have been made for them by their later dis- 
ciples. And it has taken the world a sur- 
prisingly long time to find out the utter 
absurdity of all such reasoning. 

Away back at the beginning of recorded his- 
tory, such as we read of in the Book of Genesis, 
men gave us the best ideas of God, of human 
aspirations and of moral duties that they had. 
Other men followed century after century, 
leaving behind them a most interesting and in- 
spiring record of religious development, which 
culminated at last in the teachings and the 
work of Jesus Christ. After him we have not 
looked for any further advance in the basal 
concepts of religion. No man ever spake as 
he did, and no other man ever will so speak. 
He represents the actual goal. His teaching 
not only brought to completion and fulfilment 
all that was worthy in the earlier teachings of 
prophets and sages, but it covered the ground 
so thoroughly as to leave room for no additions 
or changes. We could as soon think of a new 
mathematics in which two times two would be 


THE CHURCH MILITANT 19 


something other than four, as to think of any 
moral or spiritual improvement in what Jesus 
taught or in what he was. When humanity 
reaches his standard, if it ever does, the end 
will have come. 

The language applied to him in the New 
Testament has never been used of any other 
being. Throughout its whole history the 
church has called him divine, with varying con- 
ceptions as to just what the word means in 
this connection. The early Christians seem to 
have used this term not because they thought 
it explanatory but rather because it is the 
largest and noblest descriptive word that there 
is. For many centuries there was a growing 
tendency to shape this original enthusiasm as 
to the wonderful person of Christ into a rigid 
philosophy. The relationship between him and 
the Father was made the subject of age-long 
controversy. Other speculations of the same 
general character resulted in various dogmas 
regarding his birth of a virgin, his previous 
condition of glory, a presumed state of mental 
conflict between his divine omniscience and the 
limitations he assumed in becoming man, and 


20 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


the offering of himself as a willing sacrifice 
to satisfy certain rabbinical conceptions of 
divine justice. Out of this there grew up 
almost an entire theology that centered in the 
person not of Christ but of his mother, and 
failed to pass the tests imposed at the Prot- 
estant Reformation. The other speculations, 
however, with little more authority to stand 
upon if they had any at all, were adopted by 
the Reformers with slight examination and 
were handed down to us. They are still fought 
for, tooth and nail, by a considerable part of 
modern Protestantism. 

In the ministry of Jesus, no single fact 
stands out more clearly than this, that he ex- 
pected to have his work carried on by organized 
effort. He had scarcely begun to teach before 
he gathered a little company of intimates, 
whom he held together without additions or 
changes in personnel until the last. By far the 
larger part of his reported public work was 
the training of these men. His clear purpose 
was to make them not individual propagandists 
but an organized force. His calm confidence 
in the last tragic days, that no matter what 


THE CHURCH MILITANT 21 


might be done to him the work would go on, 
seems to be based chiefly upon his estimate of 
the spiritual force he had called into being in 
this group of men. We cannot read his last 
recorded words without feeling that he re- 
garded his work as in the highest degree suc- 
cessful. When these men—not the individuals, 
for some might fail, but the whole body— 
should be endued with the Spirit of God whom 
he was to send, he believed that they could not 
be overcome. 

From our point of view we must confess that 
this was a most unpromising body of men with 
which to begin a world work. Except for two 
remarkable experiences, the return of their 
Master from the dead and the gift of the Holy 
Ghost, no explanation of their success is pos- 
sible. They did succeed in a wonderful way. 
Within a single generation the religion of 
Christ had been carried through the known 
world. Wherever those early Christians went 
with their message, a change in men’s ideas 
of God, in their conduct among their fellow- 
men, and in their whole outlook upon life and 
destiny invariably followed. 


22 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


We shall have occasion to note, in a future 
chapter, how this first condition of the church 
was temporary and abnormal. A deterioration 
soon set in, not altogether discreditable since 
it came chiefly from the zeal with which those 
early Christians carried on their work. As 
we read the Epistles of Paul and the messages 
to the seven churches in the Apocalypse we 
recognize a marked change from the almost 
idyllic conditions immediately following Pente- 
cost. But certainly no one of those people 
could have imagined the state of division, 
mutual suspicion, and practical impotency in 
the midst of wonderful opportunities that the 
church finds itself in after nineteen hundred 
years. The first disciples were sent forth as 
sheep among wolves. Their successors have 
uniformly suffered more from the horns and 
hoofs of other sheep than from all the wolves 
that have been loosed upon them. If we take 
out of church history the parts that deal with 
heresies, persecutions of one Christian by an- 
other, theological disputes and religious wars, 
there is very little left. The actual checks 
and hindrances that the Christian faith has 


THE CHURCH MILITANT 23 


met from all its open and avowed enemies sink 
into comparative insignificance beside this 
monstrous array of misunderstandings and 
jealousies that in modern days have settled 
down into iron-bound traditions more like 
mountain feuds than like ordinary diversities 
of opinion among gentlemen. Church quarrels 
are always and everywhere the easiest to start, 
the bitterest to deal with, and the hardest to 
terminate among all the differences that arise 
in civilized society. 

A phenomenon so universal as this, and con- 
tinued so long without essential change, cannot 
be explained on the ground of mere human 
perversity. The roots of it go too deep and 
run back too far to be traceable entirely to 
personal frailties among believers. This age- 
long quarreling over opinions is part of a 
system. It rests upon a basal misconception 
of Christianity itself. Personal differences, 
conceit of opinion, and desire to rule will not 
explain the divided condition of Christendom. 
Those who engage in such controversies have 
mistaken views of Christianity itself, and of 
what it means to be a Christian believer, as 


24 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


well as wrong impulses toward Christian prac- 
tice. Consciously or unconsciously they have 
magnified correctness of opinion out of all 
proportion to its real value. They have in- 
sisted upon testing the genuineness of Chris- 
tian faith not by the result that it produces 
in the believer himself but by his subscription 
to some arbitrary interpretation of Scripture 
or theological opinion. They have counted it 
a greater honor paid to Christ to hold exalted 
opinions about his divine nature and to magnify 
his atoning office than to obey his simple com- 
mand to love one another and thus to fulfil 
every necessary law. They have been willing 
to tell one another in beautiful language the 
glory and the wonder of his sacrificial life, 
but have not been willing to bear one another’s 
burdens and in honor to prefer one another 
for his sake. 

In a word, the dissensions and divisions of 
historic Christianity have come from putting 
forward something else than Christlikeness as 
the best and only unquestionable proof that 
one is a Christian believer. Whoever has the 
spirit of Christ, or is sincerely trying to culti- 


THE CHURCH MILITANT 20 


vate it and giving Christ the glory, is a Chris- 
tian, perfectly safe for us to associate with and 
to worship beside under the same roof, even 
though he may be misinformed on some points 
of historic doctrine or may not hold exactly 
our opinion about some statement made in 
Scripture. Whoever does not have this spirit 
of Christ, and is making no effort to get it, is 
not a Christian, no matter what he believes 
or in what particular list his name happens to 
be written down. If any man have not the 
spirit of Christ, he is none of his. 

Since it is the lack of brotherhood and not 
the holding of different opinions that is the 
cause of disunity, it follows that the union of 
Christendom will not need to wait until all be- 
lievers have come round to one kind of theology 
or have cultivated a uniform taste in matters 
of worship. Unity will come when a sufficient 
number of us have learned what Christianity 
really is. We may hope that the time is draw- 
ing near at last when a true church of Christ 
will be known not by its length of history or 
its regularity of tradition so much as by the 
fact that it is actually doing, in a practical 


26 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


and sensible manner, the work that the church 
of Christ was organized and commissioned 
to do. 

We are not advocating a general massacre 
of historic theologies. We need them. They 
have no value as tests of Christian character 
but they aid very materially in clarifying our 
religious views and standardizing our faith. 
We should always keep our ancient, carefully 
worded creeds where we can lay our hands 
upon them, for the present age above all 
others needs all the help it can get in the 
direction of clear thinking in religion. It is 
the one point where we are lamentably weak. 
But creeds and theologies never should have 
been used as dividing linés between different 
bodies of Christians for they do not deal with 
things that should be regarded as divisive. 
Their function is to cultivate precision of 
thought but not to differentiate matters of 
conviction. The fact that one Christian likes 
to carry his religious thinking to ten places 
of decimals should not separate him from an- 
other who stops at two places, provided they 
both have the same number of units. 


THE CHURCH MILITANT 27 


The events of the past half-dozen years have 
made the whole problem of the true function 
of creeds in Christian work much plainer than 
it ever was before. In spite of the elaborate 
ingenuity with which the historic confessions 
of faith were formulated, so as to provide for 
every possible refinement in theological gym- 
nastics that our forefathers could think of, we 
now find them utterly inadequate to express the 
scrupulous contentiousness of modern bigotry. 
The disputes of the present hour are not be- 
tween holders of different creeds but between 
_ different interpretations of the same creed. 
All is quiet along the denominational Potomac, 
but the isotherm of theological soundness runs 
anywhere, and shifts its location every few 
days. It really begins to look as if the last 
_ days of religious factiousness have come, and 
that contentions will wear themselves out and 
disappear from the lack of ability among the 
disputants to distinguish one position from an- 
other. 

The review of church history that we here 
present must be fragmentary in the nature of 
the case, for we are dealing only with incidents 


28 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


that happen to bear most directly upon modern 
problems. In the first chapter we take up the 
century that produced the New Testament. 
No other literature ever written has held so 
great a place in human thought or has been so 
diligently read. We are seriously hampered 
in the historical study of these supremely im- 
portant writings because we have so little other 
literature covering the same period. The 
events described took place many centuries ago 
in a very small country, among a people pe- 
culiarly separated from other nations for the 
larger part of its history, and maintaining the 
spirit of aloofness with extraordinary tenacity. 
Diligent investigation, however, for the past 
hundred years or so, has thrown a great 
deal of additional light upon New Testament 
times and customs that our fathers did not 
have. The scholars of Reformation and post- 
Reformation times were diligent students of 
Scripture of a certain kind. They compared 
texts with painstaking care. They produced 
translations into the vernacular that can hardly 
be surpassed. As reverent and exhaustive 


THE CHURCH MILITANT 29 


word-studies of Scripture, their writings leave 
little to be desired. 

As to the actual life and times of the New 
Testament, however, the Reformers and their 
immediate successors not only knew very little, 
but they felt no need of knowing anything at 
all. For they had evolved a theory of inspi- 
ration that made all helps and explanations in 
Bible study practically unnecessary. To them 
the Scriptures were not ordinary literature; 
they had not been written in anything like a 
natural way, and were not to be studied as 
such. They were written by revelation, in 
some mysterious manner so as to fit their 
statements exactly into the knowledge of each 
succeeding age. Still further confusion was 
introduced into this way of thinking by the 
revival of a wide-spread, though not at this 
time a very definite, belief in the immediate 
return of Christ, a type of thought that always 
accompanies a great religious upheaval. Just 
as the Apostles were the direct heirs of all that 
sages and prophets had written, and brought 
it to a single and final system of truth, so our 


30 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


pious fathers honestly thought themselves to 
be standing on the very brink of the ages, fore- 
ordained to put all the truth that God had 
revealed down to their time into one fixed and 
final system of theology, never to be changed. 
When we consider the wild speculations that 
were in the air at the beginning of the six- 
teenth century, the strained conditions in which 
their new ecclesiastical systems had to be 
worked out, and the confusion of piety and 
politics into which they were constantly fall- 
ing, the wonder is that the Reformers suc- 
ceeded in keeping so near the bounds of sanity 
as they did. We should not judge them by 
strict modern standards for some of their ideas 
of inspiration and theology. 

A great change has come in our methods 
of interpreting Scripture. We study the Bible 
as we try to understand any other literature. 
We put ourselves, so far as we can, into the 
places of those who lived in Bible days, and 
try to look at the matters they are writing 
about from their point of view. Our effort is 
to make the Bible as natural as we can, with- 
out loss of reverence. Our fathers of a few 


THE CHURCH MILITANT ol 


generations ago, with the best intentions in the 
world, treated Bible times and characters very 
much as the medieval painters represented 
biblical scenery. The Prodigal Son was an 
Italian youth, coming home through Tuscan 
landscapes. The painter did the best he could, 
but he never had seen even a picture of Pales- 
tine. Moses receiving the tables of the law on 
the summit of the Matterhorn is not ridiculous 
to us for we feel the evident sincerity of the art- 
ist. We have something of the same feeling 
when we remember that most of our traditional 
_ doctrines of inspiration, revelation, redemption, 
atonement, justification, and other rabbinical 
concepts, which fitted into the thinking of an 
Apostle with perfect naturalness, have come 
to us by a process strikingly like the one that 
gave us our Madonnas. They are thoroughly 
biblical in their origin, and beautiful examples 
of ideal motherhood, but they never actually 
existed. Many things that we find in our 
traditional theologies are equally imaginary. 
They are Jewish and Oriental figures that our 
fathers treated as literally as they would treat 
a problem in mathematics. The significance 


32 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


attached to them in Scripture and the meaning 
loaded upon them in the ereeds are as wide 
apart as though we were dealing with two dif- 
ferent subjects. 

Following the New Testament period, we 
shall take up in the second chapter the years 
that lie between the last of the New Testament 
writings and the outbreak of the Protestant 
Reformation. As this time is fourteen cen- 
turies, we must confine ourselves to four 
topics only. The first is the transfer of Chris- 
tianity from the Hebrew to the Greek and 
Roman types of thought, covering a period of 
about two centuries. We shall make a brief 
study of the first Kcumenical Council, in the 
year 325. The next half-dozen centuries are 
the Dark Ages, in which our interest centers 
not in the darkness of them but in the great 
missionary work that was accomplished, the 
actual Christianizing of Europe. And we 
shall conclude our study of papal times by 
taking up the Revival of Learning and the 
growth of Scholasticism, our chief object being 
to trace out in this time of awakening mental 


THE CHURCH MILITANT 33 


activity the development of the kind of think- 
that gave us our Reformation theologies. 

In the third chapter we shall consider the 
Reformation and post-Reformation times, in- 
cluding the rise and decline of Puritanism, 
down to the modern age of religion, which be- 
gan less than a century ago. We can give 
little attention to the controversies between 
Protestants and Catholics, for they are prac- 
tically a dead issue. Our interest is in the 
controversies among Protestants. We come in 
this period face to face with the things that 
show how completely men had learned to put 
aside the Master’s one rule of evidence, ‘‘Ye 
shall know them by their fruits,’’ and had 
come to substitute for it the medieval rule of 
judging the purity of one’s faith by his agree- 
ment or disagreement with the prevailing 
theological dogmas. We call this attitude of 
mind medieval, because it enters so constantly 
into medieval philosophies, but in reality it 
goes back to the times of the Scribes and 
Pharisees in the four Gospels. The later 
development of this rabbinical idea is that 


34 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


one is to seek acceptance with God not so much 
by coming into right spiritual relations with 
him through Christ as by believing something 
that is absolutely true about Christ. This 
floating conviction is not always stated in such 
bald terms as these, but we can trace the effect 
of it, over and over again, in different periods 
of church history. 

The point of chief interest to us is the con- 
nection, between this kind of dogmatic teaching 
and the rise of sectarianism. It would be very 
unjust to the differing groups of early Prot- 
estants to attribute their divisions among 
themselves to mere contentiousness. They did 
have some distrust of one another, but the 
basis of their sectarianism was a profound 
misunderstanding of the church, which they 
shared about equally with the Catholics. A 
popular impression has existed for centuries 
that the Reformers abandoned Romanism, 
root and branch, and restored the New Testa- 
ment church. They did nothing of the kind, 
for two good and sufficient reasons. They did 
not desire to sever their relations with historic 
faith, and they did not know enough about the 


THE CHURCH MILITANT 30 


New Testament church to restore it even if 
they had tried. They were not constructing 
a new religion, but trying to reform an old 
one. And when all hope of actually changing 
Romanism enough to make it conform to their 
ideas of pure religion had to be abandoned, 
they tried very naturally and very consistently 
to make their new ecclesiasticisms as safely 
like the old one, with its glaring inconsistencies 
removed, as they could. It is to the credit of 
the Reformers that they loved the familiar be- 
liefs and devotional parts of religion in which 
they had been brought up from their childhood. 
Ninety per cent at least of Romish theology 
was absolutely untouched by the Reformation. 
We of the present age have rejected some parts 
of this ninety per cent, but we have done so 
not by conscious act but by the natural growth 
and changes of four centuries. 

The conception of the church that prevailed 
when our historic Protestant creeds were for- 
mulated is a matter of so much importance that 
a brief explanation at this point may make 
it clearer when we take it up in the third 
chapter. The New Testament idea of the 


386 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


church is that of a family brotherhood, bound 
together not by ties of nature or race or 
language or even of religious training but by 
the fact of spiritual birth from above. We 
may say with all confidence that the Reformers 
never came within sight of this view. To them 
the church was what it had been for more than 
a thousand years, the tool of a guaranteed 
salvation that rested not upon a new birth 
or anything of the sort but upon a promise 
made long before to Peter and the other 
Apostles. Some of the Reformers did break 
away from the sacramentarianism of the 
purely papal doctrine and taught a salvation 
resting finally upon the faith of the believer, 
of which faith the church was the sponsor and 
the necessary channel. But the tendency among 
them all was to keep just as close to the old, 
Roman idea of salvation by authority as they 
could. They left the Pope out, but they kept 
the papacy at every possible point in their 
theologies. They deserve a good deal of 
praise, in a time of profound upheaval and 
almost of anarchy, for keeping their religion in 
the safest channels that they knew. 


THE CHURCH MILITANT 37 


Of course salvation by authority gives the 
opportunity to draw a line between one’s re- 
ligion and his personal character. It would 
be most unjust to Romanist and Protestant 
alike in those days to say that either of them 
was indifferent to righteousness so long as he 
could have an ecclesiastically clear title to 
heaven. But there can be no question that the 
tendency of religion ran a good deal in that 
direction and that the difference between 
Romanist and Protestant in this regard is not 
always so pronounced as our own sectarian 
self-esteem would like to have it. Possibly the 
type of moral living was higher on the whole 
among Protestants, for they were more inter- 
ested in religion, but he would be a courageous 
historian who tries to prove this by individual 
instances. One could rob widows’ houses and 
be in quite as good standing in Protestant as 
in, Catholic churches, so far as we can See. 
The people of that age were not ready for the 
wholesale transfer of religious ideals from 
medievalism to modern standards. That kind 
of change cannot be made in an hour. It 
must have time to grow. 


38 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


The Reformation corrected many abuses and 
gave the nations of Central and Western 
Kurope a great impetus in the right direction. 
But it left the substructure of religion, the 
medieval ideas of living and believing and 
being saved, practically where they had been 
for centuries. The great religious leaders of 
the time did study the New Testament and 
show in their writings that they meditated upon 
its deep spiritual truths.. But candor compels 
us to admit that we cannot always find the 
effect of these meditations when they came to 
devising ecclesiastical systems and to battling 
with one another over creeds. One of the 
most unfortunate inheritances of the modern 
church from that age is the tendency to put 
the management of ecclesiastical matters into 
the hands of people whose religious develop- 
ment has been along the line of emotional piety 
rather than of strictly honorable and upright 
living. This may explain why so many 
religious people grow uniformly harsher, 
narrower and more censorious as they advance 
in what they call the spiritual life. Hmotion 
is essential in religion, of course. We are 


THE CHURCH MILITANT 39 


not intellectual or moral machines but living 
human beings. But emotion that is cultivated 
for its own sake, for the honorable place it 
may give us among the saints and especially 
for the purpose of assuring some otherwise 
unlovable characters that they have had a 
genuine religious experience, is a dangerous 
article to meddle with. Trying to feel religious 
without being willing to pay the price of being 
religious is the surest road to spiritual bank- 
ruptcy that we know. 

In the final chapter we shall consider some 
of the special problems of the modern church. 
Here also we cannot hope to cover more than 
a fraction of the ground. The modern church, 
like every other modern institution, suffers 
from the fact that it is trying to do a great 
many more things than it can do well. We can 
deal with only a few, that are really practical. 
We base our whole conception of what sound 
religion is upon the natural relationship that 
exists between faith and life. Any kind of 
religious teaching that fails in giving proper 
emphasis to Christlikeness of character as 
the best proof that there is of being a real 


40 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


Christian believer is heresy and ought to be 
treated as such. This does not mean that the 
Christian faith is to be stripped of its super- 
natural elements and reduced to a mere good- 
natured scheme of social betterment. Christi- 
anity is a religion, dealing with fundamental 
principles and not with the superficial adorn- 
ments of life. It is a militant faith. It never 
will be satisfied until it has turned the world 
upside down. It is intolerable to think of a 
power like this idly marking time for another 
four centuries because of its own internal cor- . 
ruptions and disagreements. We need to cut 
loose from our dead past even more than the 
church needed to do in the days of Luther, and 
we have a great deal clearer idea of what we 
want than those people possibly could have. 
In addition to the questions that concern its 
divided state and changed ideas of Scripture 
interpretation, to which we have already re- 
ferred, the more prominent problems of the 
modern chureh center about the subject of 
education and the attitude of traditional re- 
ligion toward the theories and claimed results 
of modern science. There is a prevailing im- 


THE CHURCH MILITANT 41 


pression that the preaching of the gospel has 
lost the hold that preaching once had upon 
educated minds. This might come from more 
than one cause, and a little searching of the 
educated mind itself might be wholesome, but 
for all that, theology cannot be absolved from 
the common duty devolving upon all science 
of constantly seeking to express its teachings 
in clearer language. If any authority in 
modern church life has power to keep its 
accredited teachers thinking and speaking in 
the exact mental terms and measurements of 
three centuries ago, certainly that part of the 
modern church deserves to lose its hold upon 
intelligent minds. And it is quite beside the 
question to say that we are teaching a system 
of revealed truth, and therefore cannot be held 
to the changing standards of ordinary knowl- 
edge. For that is the very point in dispute. 
The revelation was given nineteen centuries 
ago. The interpretations of it that we are 
thus required to maintain are less than four 
centuries old. Who is able to prove that the 
modern church, with its vastly increased re- 
sources of documentary and historical evidence, 


42 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


is not quite as capable of interpreting ancient 
writings as the church was three centuries or 
two centuries ago? 

Spiritual life to-day, with its multitude of 
new and changing problems, cannot thrive on 
medieval religion any more than modern physi- 
eal life could keep its pace successfully on the 
medieval practice of medicine. There can be 
no doubt that George Washington was bled to 
death in the well-meant efforts of the best 
medical practice of his day to reduce his fever. 
But any physician to-day who would use the 
same treatment in the case of a patient of far 
less value to the world than Washington was 
would find himself in trouble with the law. 
Surgery still practices phlebotomy in certain 
rare and unusual conditions but no longer as a 
cure-all. And there are some things in tradi- 
tional theology that might be revived to a 
limited extent just now, with great profit to 
some people whom we might name. But if we 
are to load our preaching down with them for 
fifty-two Sundays in the year as our fathers 
did we should find them more dangerous than 
helpful. We have a way of saying that the 


THE CHURCH MILITANT 43 


times have changed. This statement does not 
mean that the natural laws governing human 
thought have shifted their bearings and are 
running wild. It means only that society it- 
self, as well as the individuals in it, is subject 
to certain evolutionary forces and processes, 
which forces, in the manner of modern science, 
we estimate from their effects rather than from 
theories of their probable origins. 

Religion and the natural sciences have come 
into conflict in the present age, but not for the 
first time. When Copernicus, twenty-six years 
after the outbreak of the Protestant Refor- 
mation, started men’s minds in the right direc- 
tion as to the motions of the universe, placing 
the sun at the center of the planetary system, 
his views were immediately contradicted, with 
abundant proofs, in the name of religion. 
Catholic and Protestant alike suspended their 
mutual hostilities until they could put down 
this new enemy of the common faith. Luther 
called him an ‘‘upstart astrologer’’ and other 
names, and ridiculed his idea of a revolving 
world. Aside from the unquestionable fact 
that the oceans would be spilled out once a day, 


44 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


the language of Scripture on the subject was 
explicit and beyond all dispute. The Bible 
speaks of the ‘‘firmament,’’ a word that means 
‘“solid,’’ with the waters above and below 
mysteriously divided on a certain creative day, 
the greater and lesser lights rising and setting, 
as any man who is not a fool can plainly see 
with his own eyes. Luther was one of the very 
best Hebrew scholars of his age, and indeed 
has had very few superiors in any age. He 
knew what he was talking about. 

If Luther had not believed with all his heart 
that the Bible is the actual and literal com- 
munication of God to man, coming from one 
who is incapable of deceiving, written by men 
specially guided by the Holy Ghost, it is quite 
safe to say there would have been no Protestant 
Reformation, at least at that time. Moreover, 
if Luther, after directing successfully for a 
quarter of a century the greatest religious 
movement since the days of the Apostles, had 
been the kind of man tamely to yield a point 
like this to Copernicus, a dabbler in theories 
who had not mental ability enough even to be- 
come a Protestant, and had been willing to go 


THE CHURCH MILITANT 45 


before the scholars of Europe with the state- 
ment that in his opinion the Hebrew word 
for ‘‘solid’? could mean ‘‘thin air,’’? we can 
imagine what would have happened. He cer- 
tainly would have started an explosion that 
would make our latest twentieth-century 
wrangles on the subject of evolution read like 
the very peace that passeth understanding. 
Luther did nothing of the kind. He had too 
much regard for truth. These upstart theories 
contradicted Scripture and he put them down. 
We can hardly estimate the completeness of 
the victory. Copernicus had a few friends 
and disciples, all Catholics, who seem to have 
stood by his theories at the safest distance 
they could find, but so far as we are able to 
learn, there were no Protestants among them. 
That side believed in Scripture and stood by 
Genesis to a man. Fiven the mild and gentle 
Melancthon advocated the suppression of all 
Copernican discussions by law. 

Copernicus himself escaped the fate of 
Galileo, ninety years afterward, by dying on the 
very day his book ‘‘De Orbium Celestium 
Revolutionibus’’ was published. But in the 


46 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


Catholic church his theories were put under 
the ban for three centuries. Nevertheless 
there are people, even yet, who believe 
them. Since the days of Pope Pius VII 
good Catholics are permitted to have doubts 
on the subject of a solid firmament, while 
among Protestants, long before, there had 
come a gradual and somewhat shamefaced 
reinterpretation of Scripture that twists the 
language of it out of all resemblance to its 
literal meaning. At the present time we can 
find in the very amen corner those who turn 
unblushingly from the words of inspiration 
and pin their faith to speculations of men who 
spend their nights, with purely human con- 
trivances, studying the sky. It is enough to 
make Luther—and John Wesley also, who 
lamented that the speculations of a certain 
Isaac Newton in his day were unsettling the 
faith of many—turn over in their honored 
graves. 

It is always the way. For a century scien- 
tific men have been digging into the earth to 
gratify a curiosity as to how it was made, 
in spite of the fact that the Book of Genesis 


THE CHURCH MILITANT 47 


tells us, with every needed detail, all about it. 
Three score years ago Charles Darwin began 
unsettling the faith of many as to the origin and 
transmission of life, even the life of man him- 
self. Except for the stand taken by a faith- 
ful few in our churches and missions, who 
ean hardly be said to rank with Luther and 
Wesley except in persistence, these views on 
geology and evolution seem to have the support 
of schools and colleges over the whole world, 
though they contradict Scripture almost as 
plainly as the views of Copernicus did. Is it 
going to be necessary to reinterpret Genesis 
again? Is the Bible to be like the Sibylline 
Books after all, greatest in value when the 
larger part of it is gone? 

The times have changed. Medieval methods 
of thinking no longer prevail in sciences, 
mechanical arts, politics, or religion. The 
effort to save souls by spiritual alchemy, in 
gospel tent or stately cathedral, by magic art 
or by traditional authority, by anything in- 
deed other than a change of heart that shows 
itself in life, is merely to repeat in the twentieth 
century the old search for the philosopher’s 


48 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


stone. Base soul metal cannot be turned into 
gold by securing the inscription of its name 
upon the roll of the only true church. We can- 
not whip our modern minds into that way of 
reaching out after truth any more. 

In the fourth century people tried to settle 
the question of the Trinity and the nature of 
Christ by argument and the casting of votes. 
They left the question where they found it, 
with a few added perplexities. In the days 
of the Renaissance and scholasticism they 
tried to find the absolute truth by carefully 
watching the operations of the human mind. 
The antics of the said human mind are still 
the most confusing subject that we know of. 
At the Reformation they cast down the mighty 
from their seats and brought forth at last the 
real church. But the mighty seem to be still 
in their seats, and the church is still looking 
for something real. Nevertheless all these 
strivings for more light have had their in- 
calculable value. They are parts of a mighty 
process of growth. They emphasized the need 
of careful study and repeated investigation. 
They set men to thinking upon new levels. 


THE CHURCH MILITANT 49 


They gave novel and wholesome impulses in 
the direction of personal religion. They 
wakened again and again an interest in Bible 
study of which we are just beginning to reap 
the real harvest. And by demonstrating the 
limitations of all work that has human elements 
in it they have driven the church repeatedly 
back to the inexhaustible sources of its power. . 

The forms of church organization and the 
types of effort put forth century after century 
have always reflected to a large extent the 
character of the age that produced them. The 
best minds in the church have always sought 
for liberty. The narrowest minds have always 
opposed it. But this does not mean in re- 
ligion, any more than in other things, that all 
efforts to advance are marked by wisdom, or 
that conservatism is not sometimes the wisest 
position that the church can assume. The 
Christian faith, however, more than any and 
all other human interests, rests upon certain 
principles that give it an unmistakable tendency 
toward progress. One of its most fundamental 
policies is based upon the statement that new 
wine cannot be put into old bottles with safety. 


50 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


The loss of the old bottles might be borne, 
but the wine would be spilled. The most 
evident sign of the times is the fact that the 
new cloth of modern religious knowledge and 
culture is already making the rents larger in 
the hopeless old garments of church life that 
mistaken timidity is still trying to repair. 
The conviction grows upon us that recon- 
struction and not repair is what we need. 

The Master on the shore is calling to this 
toiling age, more clearly, we think, than to any 
previous age in history, that the shallow-water 
methods of the fruitless night, now almost past, 
will never succeed. The church must launch 
out into the deep and let down its nets with a 
wider sweep of faith. 


THE CHURCH COURAGEOUS 


As my days lengthen, my creed shortens. 
RoswELL Dwicut HItTcHcocK. 


Religion seems to have grown an infant with age, and 
requires miracles to nurse it, as it had in infancy. 
JONATHAN SWIFT. 


It is a superficial and unphi‘osophical temperament that 
disparages institutions. For institutions are only another 
name for that organized life by which God rules the world. 

BisHop H. C. Porter. 


The practice of the Apostles is not an invariable rule 
or law of binding force upon succeeding ages. They acted 
according to the circumstances of the church in its infant 
and persecuted state. 

BisHop HooKEr. 


The collection of sacred books was brought about grad- 
ually, spontaneously, silently. The judgment appeared as 
the natural manifestation of the life of the Christian body, 
and not as the logical consequence of definite principles. 

Brooke Foss Westrcorr, in “Canon of the New 
Testament.” 


We do not want to read the New Testament any less. 
But we do want to read it in rather a different way. We 
want to heighten the personal religion of which it is the 
principal source and inspiration, without being captured 
by the spiritual waywardness and obstinacy which have 
led to the innumerable divisions of the Christian world and 
have paralyzed its power of corporate witness. 

R, H, Mauen, 


CHAPTER I 
THE CHURCH COURAGEOUS 


ISTORIC Christianity goes back to two 
principal records. ‘The first is a group 
of four memorabilia called ‘‘Gospels’’ or good 
news, covering a brief period of the life and 
ministry of Jesus, a village carpenter of 
Nazareth, in Galilee. He made no name for 
himself among conspicuous or _ influential 
people. All that we know of his teaching, 
somewhat after the manner of the older He- 
brew prophets, rests upon the testimony of a 
few men, obscure like himself, who had become 
his devoted followers. His violent death at 
the age of about thirty-three years, though 
under the form of a legal execution, was the 
result of an outbreak of religious fanaticism. 
No literature of any kind of which we have 


record was written by him, or under his super- 
53 


o4 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


vision, or in obedience to any command or 
suggestion that he ever gave. 

The other record deals with the organized 
work of these disciples after the death of 
their Master. The part of it that covers the 
very earliest days was not written until forty 
years or more after the events that it describes. 
It is not the report of an eye-witness but comes 
to us in the form of traditions, collected and 
written out by a man named Luke, for his 
friend Theophilus. It begins with the ex- 
periences of about a hundred and twenty 
people, already believers in the prophetic 
power of Jesus, eleven of whom had been 
chosen by him as intimate friends and compan- 
ions. The latter part of the same book, mainly 
filled with the experiences of the great Apostle 
St. Paul, is written in a style quite different 
from the earlier report of traditions, and con- 
tains many experiences of Luke himself. 
Following this Book of the Acts there are a 
number of Epistles, one running into an elabo- 
rate apocalypse, that carry the history of the 
church down to the end of the first Christian 
century. 


THE CHURCH COURAGEOUS 55 


Between the ministry of Jesus and the first 
gathering of the church there was a brief 
period, falling within the fifty days between 
Passover and Pentecost, covered by what seems 
to have been an independent record, though it 
comes to us as the closing part of the Gospels, 
and runs over into the Acts. It is the testi- 
mony of certain disciples who claimed to have 
seen and to have talked with their Master after 
he was risen from the dead. These experiences 
were not reported originally by one person but 
by two at least, for there is a marked difference 
in the reports of appearances in Jerusalem and 
in Galilee. Those who claimed to be present 
on these occasions clung to their story all their 
lives, and indeed most of them lost their lives 
mainly because of their unswerving testimony. 
The whole record clearly indicates that if it 
had not been for these reappearances of their 
Master, the disciples never would have under- 
taken the task of preaching a new religion to 
the world. Throughout the Acts and the 
Epistles this single item, the resurrection of 
Jesus from the dead, is uniformly regarded as 
the very crux and center of the whole Christian 


06 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


system, the chief of all the historic facts upon 
which their faith was built. 

When we consider the time, the peculiar 
history of the Jewish people and the fact that 
this question of the resurrection was constantly 
discussed among them, it could not be called 
surprising that a resurrection tradition should 
arise, of the usual childish and superstitious 
form. They were not troubled by any of our 
modern ideas concerning the nature and the 
origin of life. They did not look upon death 
as the result of natural law but as the cutting 
off of days by an independent, personal power, 
who might repent, or change his purpose, and 
undo what he had done. They believed that 
their Master had brought back the dead, just 
as any great prophet could, by producing this 
change of purpose in him who caused the death. 
They had no clear idea of immortality apart 
from bodily resurrection. King Herod be- 
lieved in resurrection. Martha believed it. 
The Romans had sealed the tomb and had 
set a watch because of so many rumors on 
this subject. The disciples were not looking 
for the return of their Master so soon, but 


THE CHURCH COURAGEOUS 57 


there was nothing in their habit of thought or 
previous convictions that would dispose them 
to doubt the word of any among their fellow- 
disciples who might claim to have seen the 
risen Jesus. 

Yet this is just what they did. The strangest 
feature of the early resurrection narratives is 
the surprise and incredulity of the disciples. 
And their perplexity seems not to have dimin- 
ished, even after he had appeared to them 
again and again. We judge that it was not the 
fact but the manner of the resurrection that 
confused them, being so different from any- 
thing that they could have imagined before- 
hand. That a great prophet should come back 
with power and glory, in visible preparation 
for restoring the kingdom of Israel, would have 
seemed to them entirely natural. The words 
of the two disciples going to Emmaus show this 
attitude of mind very clearly. But to come 
secretly, at no time except when he could find 
them quite alone; to tell them nothing except 
what he had already told; to supplement his 
minute revelations concerning the heavenly es- 
tate on the night of the betrayal, with not a 


58 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


single word as to his own recent experiences 
there; not even to bring the promised Com- 
forter, but only to repeat his promise without 
essential change; and then to close these inde- 
terminate interviews with a mysterious de- 
parture that left them no plan or task for the 
immediate future, except to look for something 
that was not adequately described—surely no 
imagination in the world was ever vivid enough 
to make up such stories as these. It is an ab- 
surdity utterly without parallel, to think of a 
few simple-minded fishermen laying plans to 
preach a world religion upon a manufactured 
foundation such as these reported interviews 
with their Master, the rejected and crucified 
Nazarene. We must dismiss the whole hy- 
pothesis of conscious deception on the part of 
the disciples, as not worthy of a moment’s 
thought. 

They saw, or certainly thought they saw, the 
risen Jesus. And the remarkable thing, put- 
ting all other mysteries of these peculiar ex- 
periences quite in a secondary place, is the 
effect of them upon the disciples themselves. 
When he first came he found a disheartened and 


THE CHURCH COURAGEOUS 59 


partly scattered group of men. Fifty days 
later they had grown into heroes. The power 
that can be explained only by the possession 
of unbounded faith was theirs. And yet he 
had given them, in all the times he had met 
them, not a single proof or argument that they 
could use in convincing any possible gainsayer. 
Unlettered men though they were, they must 
have known that they had no actual evidence 
of the resurrection that was worth the breath it 
would take to tell it. Their own testimony in 
such a case could have no other effect than to 
provoke derision. They said they had seen 
their Master. But who'were they? Who else 
had seen him? Why did he hide himself here 
and there with them, when the whole Jewish 
nation, and the world, were eagerly waiting for 
proof of the very things that they told? 

The modern mind confesses to an unholy 
curiosity as to what might have happened if 
the risen Christ had suddenly appeared to 
Caiphas or to Pontius Pilate. Why not? 
Neither of them could injure him now. He had 
said his kingdom was not of this world. Now 
he could bring proof of it that nobody could 


60 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


question. And the fact that we ourselves have 
such views as these on the subject is one of the 
weaknesses of modern religion. The insistent 
and unconquerable desire to find knock-down 
arguments, the hope of some day coming into 
possession of evidence enough to club the most 
blatant opponent of Christianity into sub- 
mission, is one of our inheritances from 
centuries of religious controversy that never 
came in sight of what Jesus was teaching. It 
is not at all different from the Mohammedan 
effort to convert the world by the sword. It is 
the very temptation that the Master met and 
overcame in the wilderness. The disciples 
themselves, before he rose from the dead, 
seemed to have had exactly these ideas of ad- 
vancing his cause. They were hoping to sit 
at his right hand and his left, and had utterly 
mistaken his promise that they should judge 
the twelve tribes of Israel. In such a ease, the 
twelve tribes were judged already, and some- 
thing very unpleasant was coming to them. 
The most striking feature of these peculiar 
interviews with the risen Master is the evident 
fact that there gradually came into the minds 


THE CHURCH COURAGEOUS 61 


of the disciples an entirely different idea of his 
kingdom and of their relation to it. Just what 
produced the change is the supreme mystery of 
the resurrection. The nearest experience akin 
to it that we can think of is the birth of love. 
Two people meet time after time, speaking of 
indifferent subjects, having no experiences at 
all dissimilar from ten thousand other human 
incidents, and then find that their whole outlook 
upon life, their purposes in it, and their possible 
enjoyment of it have utterly changed. So the 
disciples wakened to new conceptions of re- 
higion. They could no longer think of their 
Master wanting to triumph over Pilate or any- 
one else. He had already made his appeal to 
all that was highest in the man, and when that 
failed there was nothing else to do. The kind 
of religion that Jesus came to establish cannot 
be propagated by mere marshaling of proofs 
and arguments. To have dragged the most 
conspicuous example of unbelief in Jerusalem 
at the chariot-wheels of a triumphant demon- 
stration, untouched by a spiritual appeal but 
convinced against his will by undeniable facts, 
might do for some modern types of evangelism, 


62 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


but it would never bring a Pentecost. The 
Christian church was to be founded upon ideas 
of the Kingdom of God very different from 
these. Nothing but changed hearts passes 
current there. The triumph of one opinion 
over another is a good way to drive out faith, 
but if they wished to produce faith they must 
first cultivate love for God and for their fellow- 
men, upon which alone can true and saving 
faith be built. 

It is greatly to be feared that if some of us 
modern believers had enjoyed the opportunities 
of those first disciples we might have wrecked 
the Christian church at the start, instead of 
well nigh wrecking it nineteen centuries after- 
ward, by our inordinate curiosity. We want to 
know where he got the clothes he appeared in, 
how he secured the food and built the fire by the 
lake. We are full of conjectures. Their 
minds were so open that we call them blank. 
They seem to have been in the condition de- 
scribed in the scene upon the Mount of Trans- 
figuration, and when they spoke they scarcely 
knew what they said. Only once did Peter 
break over this reserve, after the early break- 


THE CHURCH COURAGEOUS ~ 63 


fast on the shore, and he was gently and prop- 
erly rebuked. Their Master told them little in 
these interviews, for they already knew far too 
much. They had made up their minds as to the 
kind of religion the world needs. Israel was 
to be restored. The religion of the Jews, with 
a few added features, was to be planted upon 
the ruins of the Roman Empire. The day of 
vengeance was at hand. They were going to 
show to the world what the chosen people were 
chosen for. 

Then the Master came. He used no argu- 
ments. Such mistaken ideas of religion as 
these cannot be corrected by logic. He brought 
them no definite plans. They had too many 
plans now. He brought nothing but himself. 
And as they met him, time after time, as their 
hearts burned within them when he reopened 
the old, familiar Scriptures again and again, 
with the new light breaking upon them, the con- 
viction took shape that their Master, even in 
heavenly glory, had as much desire to be with 
them again as they had to be with him. He 
had come not to teach them anything but that 
his joy might be in them and that their joy 


64 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


might be full. They learned that resurrection 
is not a dogma to be proved but the natural 
state of a new life, given from above; the per- 
fect restoration of the only relationships in life 
that are worth having. Their experience was 
something like that of St. Paul, and of all 
others who have met the risen Lord, not to be 
known by its evidences but by its effect upon 
themselves. They had known Jesus in the 
flesh. Henceforth they were to know that 
Jesus no more. They would have been hope- 
lessly hampered in trying to preach the gospel 
if their knowledge had been confined to what 
the theologians call his ‘‘estate of humiliation.’’ 
They now had a glorified Christ to preach, the 
same one indeed that we have to preach. Jesus 
as a teacher is a wonderful basis for religion. 
That story never grows old. But there is no 
gospel to preach except Christ crucified and 
risen again. 

In the report of his appearing to the eleven 
upon the mountain in Galilee, it is said that 
they worshiped him, but some doubted. The 
narrative shifts abruptly at this point, as 
though the writer had now told us all we could 


THE CHURCH COURAGEOUS 65 


ever wish to know. He left out the one thing 
that we do wish to know, whether they con- 
tinued to doubt, or were convinced; and if they 
were convinced we should like very much to 
know how it was done. It is incredible that 
the writer, presumably Matthew, did not know 
this part of the incident quite as well as the 
part that he tells us. And he must have 
been a strange tax-gatherer indeed if he did 
not know human nature well enough to realize 
that if it was proof he was trying to set forth 
he should have told us the rest of the story, or 
else he should have left out this part of it 
altogether. 

If Matthew’s thought, however, had nothing 
to do with evidence—and the narrative broken 
off in the middle reveals the unconscious work- 
ing of a mind unspeakably exalted whenever he 
thought of that blessed companionship, believed 
to be lost for the rest of this life, but now 
restored in wonderful winsomeness forever—it 
is difficult to see how the Spirit of God could 
give him better words than this fragmentary 
sentence in which to anticipate some of the rich- 
est spiritual experiences of millions and mil- 


66 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


lions of believers, all down the centuries. We 
all have had our doubts, right in the face of evi- 
dence. Others about us have been joyfully be- 
lieving, while we, with the same opportunities, 
have been unable to believe. Can we explain 
what became of our doubts? Very seldom in- 
deed do we know the manner of their going. 
All that we know is they went. They simply 
dropped away and left us free. They did not 
come from the lack of argument in the first 
place, and they did not go for the abundance 
of it. Faith is not belief but adventure, and 
doubt is only the under side of faith. The 
experience of these eleven men upon the moun- 
tain carried in it a promise of their future use- 
fulness that is almost enough in itself to ac- 
count for Pentecost. They had been believers. 
They still were, the whole eleven of them, 
though some doubted. For they did not doubt 
Christ. They only questioned whether this 
appearance that they saw actually was Christ. 
The believers did not draw aside their skirts 
from the inquirers, in the modern fashion 
that we all know so well, and call them ration- 
alists. They did not set themselves above 


THE CHURCH COURAGEOUS 67 


their questioning brethren as a_ superior 
kind of Christians. They did not fall into dis- 
pute. We judge that the difference between 
the two parties was the question whether this 
was a disembodied appearance, or was actual 
flesh and bones. So far as the record tells us, 
these two opinions among the Apostles per- 
sisted down to the Day of Pentecost and later. 
And there was no difference in spiritual power 
on that day because there had been, and prob- 
ably still were, among the Apostles themselves 
two theological views as radically divergent as 
anything that ever came up between Catholic 
and Protestant, Unitarian and Trinitarian, 
upon a question that is as fundamental in 
Christianity as any question can be, namely the 
nature of Christ’s resurrection body. The fact 
that men of such diverse views on such a sub- 
ject could yet work together in perfect harmony 
undoubtedly had much to do with bringing the 
first Christian Pentecost. <A similar act among 
modern Christians would bring Pentecost 
again, 

These early preachers were Hebrews, and 
their audiences were Hebrew. They quoted 


68 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


Scripture by the page, as is evidenced in the 
reported sermons of Peter and Stephen, and 
their quotations hit the mark even less fre- 
quently than most of ours do. But when they 
came to speak of Jesus, power went forth with 
what they said. They had been with him, in 
every sense in which the words can be used. 
They appealed to facts, of course, for Christi- 
anity is historically built upon things that 
occurred. But they did not depend upon mere 
proof and argument. Their unanswerable plea 
was not what could be said about their faith 
but what that faith made of those who sincerely 
and intelligently accepted it. 

We take up next the story of the early 
church. It was not an elaborate organization. 
For a time it seems to have been little more 
than an advanced school of Hebrew thought. 
They counseled in their upper chamber and 
worshiped in the Temple. Previous to the Day 
of Pentecost they had taken a step toward 
organization that seems to have been ill 
advised. Surmising, by a fearful wrench of 
Scripture, that the number of the Apostles 
must be kept at twelve, and that the essential 


THE CHURCH COURAGEOUS _ 69 


qualification of an Apostle was what he had 
seen and heard, and not the fact that he had 
been called by the Master, they chose by lot 
Matthias, one of the two candidates who could 
pass this test. He drops out of the record so 
promptly that we are unable to conjecture how 
well he filled his man-made apostleship. What 
we know is that he never displaced Judas, who 
still holds the twelfth position in every list, 
picture, and group of statuary in the world. 
We could not do without him. 

A real problem, however, soon appeared. 
It grew out of the necessity of caring for the 
poor, and especially for those who had come to 
Jerusalem without making provision for an 
extended stay, and had joined the number of 
the believers. The local members of the church 
did what was natural and necessary. ‘Those 
who had salable property disposed of it to pro- 
vide for this need. Afterward some who had 
possessions in distant places did the same. In 
the enthusiasm there arose the conviction that 
all property, sold and unsold, held by Chris- 
tians was not theirs, but belonged to the whole 
number of believers. They were not instituting 


70 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


a new social order, or thinking of such a thing. 
They were merely pulling down their barns 
because of the sudden abundance of the’ har- 
vest. 

The money, thus wastefully provided, was 
brought to the Apostles, who were just then 
the busiest men in the world. They had one 
clear and unmistakable precedent. If they had 
held any opinion at all of being under a rigid 
and divinely ordered system of church govern- 
ment, their course was very plainly marked out 
for them. Judas had carried the bag. They 
had elected Matthias to be his successor and to 
take his office. The duty of administering 
this fund plainly belonged to Matthias. The 
early church, however, had not fallen into the 
modern church’s slavery to precedent. The 
Apostles called a mass meeting and boldly 
launched a scheme that is not in the Old Testa- 
ment and is not hinted of in any of their pre- 
vious relations with the Master. It was the 
clearest possible case of pure synagogue de- 
mocracy. A new church office was created on 
the spot. Seven men, a Hebrew number, were 
chosen and set apart by the laying on of hands. 


THE CHURCH COURAGEOUS 71 


When they chose Matthias they had prayed 
first and then cast lots. Now they voted first 
and prayed afterward. The art of church 
government was coming on by leaps and 
bounds. These seven men, solemnly ordained 
by what seems to have been a synagogue cere- 
mony, were selected not to preach but to dis- 
tribute alms. Their commission was to serve 
tables, so that the preaching could be done by 
those who knew how. Some of the seven re- 
fused to abide by their instructions. We are 
not told what kind of care Stephen gave to his 
widows, but the first thing we learn of him he 
has abandoned them and is preaching to the 
Jews with such power and success as to lead 
to his own martyrdom. 

Another shoemaker who did not stick to his 
last was Philip. He soon appears in the 
apostolic offices of preaching and baptizing, 
with such prominence as to crowd the real 
Apostle of the same name completely off the 
stage, and we never hear of him again. The 
early church was more interested in getting the 
work done than it was concerned over the 
manner of doing it. The records are too 


72 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


scanty to admit of dogmatizing, but the fact 
is palpably clear that they had no idea of a 
foreordained and divinely authoritative system 
of church government, definitely given and 
never to be changed. So much volunteer serv- 
ice led to confusion, and they found it necessary 
to put authority into the hands of those who 
showed the ability to keep some kind of order 
among the saints. Formal church government 
was of slow and natural growth. When their 
system proved to be inadequate, or did not 
suit them, they changed it. 

They deferred to the opinion of the Apostles, 
very naturally, as having been intimately 
associated with the Master. Apostolic leader- 
ship was much in evidence but Apostolic 
authority had not yet appeared. Simon Peter, 
first of the Twelve and earliest preacher of all, 
got himself into trouble by admitting Gentiles 
to fellowship and was called upon to explain. 
Not all his self-appointed inquisitors put to- 
gether could have had Peter’s opportunities 
to know just what was the mind of the Master 
in such a case. But so far from exercising his 
authority as Primate Apostle, or even citing the 


THE CHURCH COURAGEOUS = 73 


language of the Great Commission to preach 
the gospel to every creature, we find Peter 
speaking almost in a tone of apology. He 
admits that he had not thought of Christianity 
as anything but an exclusively Hebrew faith 
until the matter had been made clear to him 
in a vision. It is greatly to be regretted that 
visions have gone out of style in the modern 
church. A great sheet let down by the four 
corners, with a few near-human ancestors in 
it, would not shock the sensibilities of any 
twentieth-century brother more profoundly 
than Peter’s animals went contrary to every 
prejudice that he had. And it might help a 
little toward the settlement of some present- 
day controversies. 

So many wonderful things had come suddenly 
into the lives of these devout and sincere 
followers of the Christ that they could not yet 
reason out each separate truth in all its logical 
bearings. The natural effect of faith, then as 
now, was not to force the religion of all men 
into one exact mold but to develop each man 
independently along the line of his own highest 
capabilities, at a speed in exact proportion to 


74 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


his own teachableness. They had not arrived 
at the problem of just how little faith one can 
have and still be a Christian, or how much of 
adulteration faith can stand before it passes 
over the line and becomes unbelief. 

If we stand at the thirteenth chapter of the 
Book of the Acts we are between the two 
natural parts of the Christian church. On the 
farther side, it is the church of tradition. It 
had no records, at least none that have been 
preserved. The wonderful events upon which 
it was based and by which it grew for half a 
century were handed down by oral legends. 
Compared with ordinary legends they are ex- 
ceptionally reliable. They report many things 
which we should unhesitatingly set down as 
fiction, if we were to find them in other narra- 
tives of equal antiquity. In the legends of 
the early church, however, we must take into 
consideration the very exceptional nature of 
the events themselves which they report. It 
is not reasonable, for example, to compare the 
New Testament miracles with similiar stories 
that concern purely normal periods of history. 
The cases are not parallel. The most that we 


THE CHURCH COURAGEOUS = 75 


can say of the part of the New Testament pre- 
ceding the thirteenth chapter of the Acts is 
that the language of it is too poetic and imagi- 
native to be bound down by mathematically 
strict rules of interpretation. Some leeway 
must be given as to the exact significance of 
this or that statement, or we shall go utterly 
wild in our efforts to comprehend this part 
of the sacred narrative. 

In the church of tradition we find practically 
all the miracles of the New Testament, nearly 
all the mysticism, and a very pronounced type 
of unthinking faith. These are abnormal ex- 
periences. Just how much the abnormal 
character of them was heightened in the tell- 
ing is a question that different readers of the 
New Testament will deal with in different 
ways. Our immediate spiritual ancestors of 
the Puritan times had no question where they 
drew the line. The mystery to them was 
entirely in the events that were reported, and 
the reports were absolutely literal. Some 
modern Bible readers go clear over to the 
opposite view. They insist that the incidents 
which the Gospel writers describe, and the 


76 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


originals of the early legends from which Luke 
compiled the first ten chapters of the Acts, 
were as bald and colorless as the daily life of 
a modern American village, and that the mys- 
tery is wholly in the way they were finally 
narrated. These are the two extreme opinions. 
How intelligent readers of the New Testament 
are to understand these records depends a good 
deal upon their type of mind, and whether their 
natural inclinations are toward or against a 
belief in miracles. 

In the legend narratives we find a naive and 
refreshing type of faith. These early believers 
do not know what fear is, and when they meet 
danger it is with open defiance. They rather 
enjoy being arrested and imprisoned, for escape 
is certain and the experience is pretty sure to 
be interesting. Peter is delivered by prayer, 
and when he appears at the door of the very 
house where they are praying for him, they 
refuse to believe that it is Peter, though we 
can hardly call this an exclusive experience of 
the early church. Peter himself, on the house- 
top, hears what he recognizes as a divine com- 
mand to slay and eat, and three times refuses 


THE CHURCH COURAGEOUS 77 


to obey, though one would think Peter had had 
trouble enough already with the number three 
to make him more careful. Believers were of 
one heart, which is always possible. But they 
were of one mind also, and that can be the case 
only in the very childhood of a religion. 

On the hither side of the thirteenth chapter 
of the Acts is the church of history. We find 
a faith that faces enormously greater tasks 
but lacks the impulsive quality. Systematic 
administration of relief has taken the place 
of community of goods. The thorn in the 
flesh, which is seriously hindering the greatest 
work in the world, is not removed, though 
devoutly prayed for. We can hardly avoid re- 
gretting that the Pentecostal church did not 
have a chance at that thorn. Mob violence is 
no longer met with open defiance, but the 
boldest soul in Christendom has already been 
let down over the Damascus wall in a basket. 
The church in Jerusalem, healing by shadow, 
delivered by angels, is living on the alms of 
strangers. The church in Antioch, calmly 
mapping out its world field and generously 
measuring its resources against the mighty 


78 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


task, becomes henceforth the pattern of the 
Glorious Bride of Christ. 

The Antioch church reaches this high place, 
not in the fashion of a few centuries later by 
cultivating an exclusive apostolic authority, 
but in just the opposite manner, by giving its 
Apostles away. Barnabas and Saul are called 
for by the Holy Ghost, who does not speak 
again in the first person singular in the New 
Testament. And the church rose to the 
occasion. Being asked to give, it gave its 
best. We note that the simple democracy of 
twenty years before has already disappeared. 
No mass-meeting was called. Five men only, 
Simeon, Lucius, Manaen, and the two Apostles 
themselves, are mentioned as taking this mo- 
mentous step. They are called prophets and 
teachers. Who was prophet and who was 
teacher we are not told; and we look in vain 
for the familiar names, necessary to any true 
church, of bishop and elder. Saul had already 
been sent far hence to the Gentiles and had 
been ordained by the laying on of the hands 
of Ananias. But he does not hesitate to accept 
reordination at the hands of mere prophets and 


THE CHURCH COURAGEOUS 79 


teachers. Of the three hundred denominations 
in America there is not one so small and 
ignorant, or occupying quarters in a back alley 
so obscure, that it could not have told these 
Antioch brethren how they were making scores 
of inexcusable blunders in church government, 
and were not proceeding in the only true and 
proper New Testament way at all. 

In the church of history, miracles seem to 
have ceased. But nobody asks what had be- 
come of them, or why the very men who had 
accomplished such wonderful things in their 
early ministry did not go on doing these mighty 
works in the far more strenuous and danger- 
ous times of their subsequent labors. Some 
kind of evidence more satisfactory had come 
in. Whether these Christian leaders still had 
the power to work miracles and chose not to 
exercise it, whether they once had this power 
and had lost it, or whether they never had 
such power at all but only made use of extraor- 
dinary events that got into the report as 
miracles—all such questions are quite aside 
from the main issue. The church was doing 
wonderful things in a wonderful way. It was 


80 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


bringing a new world into being. It was trans- 
forming human lives. Thenceforth the Man of 
Nazareth must be reckoned with in every great 
movement that humanity was to know, down to 
the very end of time. 

Unfortunately the church in after centuries 
has not always been content to stay on its own 
side of the thirteenth chapter of the Acts. In 
times of spiritual decline, and in its flounder- 
ing efforts to rise out of them not by sincere 
repentance but by the easier road of excite- 
ment and enthusiasm, the church all down the 
ages has showed the usual tendency of all living 
things, and occasionally reverts to type. It 
longs to see again the marvels of its earliest 
days, and to reénter the heaven that lay about 
it in infancy. The sick religion, like the sick 
man, ‘‘babbles o’ green fields.’’ Pietistic 
theories and ecstatic experiences reappear. 
Driveling platitude and the unspeakable vul- 
garity of the half-full religious cup that is 
trying to run over find multitudes of hearers. 
Diseased minds, bodies, and estates are healed. 
Simon the Sorcerer comes forward and fills his 
purse. And the air is filled with the familiar 


THE CHURCH COURAGEOUS 81 


rabbinical jargon that announces for the thou- 
sandth time that the signs are at last fulfilled 
that herald the immediate coming of Christ. 

All such things are but eddies in the onward 
current. The enduring work of making this 
world Christian will be accomplished in the 
future as in the past by the type of religious 
effort whose center of gravity falls within its 
base. When the church grows wise enough to 
leave its piecemeal infallibilities in the historic 
fog out of which they came, and sets itself to 
do a man’s task in a man’s way, we may hope 
to see the victories of its first estate far more 
than repeated in the wonderful opportunities 
of its present position. The early church was 
no more willing to do the Lord’s work than 
we are. But they were willing to do it in the 
Lord’s way. 

The New Testament contains twenty-seven 
books, just half of which number, thirteen 
Epistles and one half of the Acts, tell of the 
work accomplished by a single man, who was 
not one of the original disciples nor a member 
of the original church. These Epistles of St. 
Paul are the oldest part of the New Testament. 


82 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


We know pretty accurately the order in which 
they were written, though we cannot determine 
the exact dates. They were written and in 
circulation probably a dozen years before a 
single one of the four Gospels was prepared. 
The church was not built upon a book. Jesus 
sent his disciples to preach his gospel every- 
where. He laid upon none of them the charge 
to write it. The children of Perea whom he 
took into his arms and blessed could have had 
grandchildren old enough to read the first 
written account of the incident that we have. 
All the early Christians used the Old Testa- 
ment, in an imperfect Greek translation, but 
the church made its most rapid growth and 
many of its most conspicuous conquests before 
it had any sacred writings of its own. 

It is not certain that we have any of the 
Epistles of St. Paul in the exact form as he 
dictated them. The four letters that he wrote 
to Corinth seem to be combined in the two that 
we have. The Epistle to the Romans closes 
with personal salutations to about thirty 
people, though the writer never had been in 
Rome, and most of the names, if not all, are 


THE CHURCH COURAGEOUS _ 83 


of people in Ephesus. There are problems 
known to every biblical scholar concerning the 
Hpistles to Timothy and to Titus. But these 
are mere matters of detail. There can be no 
serious question that the letters as we have 
them are entirely Pauline. 

So far as we can judge, the oldest of the 
four Gospels is Mark’s. It was written by a 
man of very mature years, who had been the 
companion of Barnabas and Saul in his younger 
days and had been with Peter for most of his 
lifetime. It is the shortest of the Gospels, but 
this does not mean that Mark did not know a 
great many true incidents which he failed to 
report. He had heard Peter tell of those 
wonderful days with the Master thousands of 
times, but he was writing a book that must be 
brief, readily copied, and easily carried. We 
are not told just what his method of selection 
was, whether he used his own judgment or 
chose the incidents that appeared most fre- 
quently in Peter’s preaching. Of course they 
are not always the things that we, in our dif- 
ferent circumstances, would probably find 
most interesting, but Mark was writing for 


84 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


his own time and his own people. If the 
eleven faithful disciples had come together 
shortly after Pentecost, with a stenographer, 
they might have filled a dozen volumes with 
gospel incidents and sayings that would be 
of absorbing interest to us. But such books 
never could have taken the place, and never 
could have done the work, of the historical 
Gospels that we have. They are the records 
of half a century,—and in the fourth Gospel, 
of three fourths of a century,—of preach- 
ing, as well as of a few months’ personal 
experiences with the Master. For they con- 
tain the sifted, tested, and ten-thousand- 
times-repeated incidents and brief discourses 
that the early Christians found most use for 
in establishing the church. } 

Our knowledge of the early church is partly 
historical, coming from the later chapters in 
the Book of the Acts, and partly drawn from 
exhortations and counsels in the Epistles. 
Many things are told in elaborate detail which 
the church has had no use for since the first 
century. Circumcision, speaking in tongues, 
eating food offered to idols, the eagerly ex- 


THE CHURCH COURAGEOUS 85 


pected return of Christ in that generation, 
women’s head-dresses, sorceries, divinations, 
and all such matters are dead issues that 
occupy considerable space in the New Testa- 
ment. Other matters of an incidental nature 
that have proved to be of great interest in 
later times are not mentioned at all, or are 
told in such indefinite terms as to have led to 
age-long controversy. The names and func- 
tions of church officers, and the whole problem 
of church government; the proper-method of 
administering the sacraments, particularly 
baptism; and even the terms of admitting mem- 
bers to their various churches, upon which 
terms the whole problem of household or in- 
fant baptism rests, as well as the little- 
understood ceremony or practice of being 
baptized for the dead, cannot be decided. No 
misunderstandings or controversies upon these 
subjects had yet arisen, calling for mention 
of them in the Epistles. New Testament 
Christians were interested in more important 
things. The early churches resemble, in this 
respect, certain fortunate nations which for 
long periods of time had no recorded history. 


86 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


Churches must be governed, or at least they 
must be administered, in some way. But be- 
yond a general indication that customs in dif- 
ferent localities showed considerable variation, 
we have no real knowledge of details in the 
New Testament. Church officers have different 
names: bishops, or ‘‘overseers’’; elders, a 
word that means practically the same as ‘‘sena- 
tors’’; deacons or ministers; pastors or shep- 
herds; prophets and teachers. Centuries of 
vigorous controversy as to the precise func- 
tions discharged by each of these officials have 
left the question exactly where it was before 
the controversies began. If converts are to 
be baptized at all this ordinance must be 
administered after some manner, either exactly 
alike in all cases or with variations. Who- 
ever is interested in the question how this 
was done has access nowadays to whole 
libraries on the subject, beyond the possibility 
of being read with care in any ordinary life- 
time. And if one could read them all, he might 
know more about the controversy than he does, 
but he would not know anything more about 
baptism. 


THE CHURCH COURAGEOUS = 87 


Half a dozen descriptive sentences upon 
these subjects anywhere in the New Testament 
might have saved centuries of misunderstand- 
ing, division, controversies, and religious wars. 
But it is a question whether a religion of mint, 
anise, and cummin, such as certainly would 
have been built upon this information, would 
not have been worse than all the disputes that 
have arisen for the lack of it. And it is even 
a more pertinent question whether controversy 
would have been saved in any case. If we do 
not like our fellow-Christians, God himself can- 
not state truth clearly enough to avoid dispute. 
If some modern discovery of long-buried manu- 
scripts would give us the exact information 
upon these subjects that we never have had, 
such a discovery would only impose upon us 
the necessity of finding something else to differ 
about, so long as we continue in the spiritual 
state of keeping uselessly alive the contro- 
versies that we now have. And when we are 
ready to come together, we can do so without 
this information precisely as well and as satis- 
factorily as if we knew it all. 

If the Lord Jesus Christ ever had intended 


88 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


that any church of his should be known as a 
true church by the accident of having stumbled 
upon the exact method of New Testament 
administration, or because it has called its 
servers of tables by one name rather than 
by another, or holds a certain one out of 
several philosophies of religion or has main- 
tained a regularly transmitted succession of 
ceremonials, then we must admit that all 
scholarship for centuries has most seriously 
misunderstood a few incisive words of his to 
the Scribes and Pharisees. There is only one 
quest of the modern church that is really worth 
while. It is not to find proofs or disproofs of 
verbal inspiration. It is not to determine the 
opinion that the church must forever hold as 
to the virgin birth, bodily resurrection, 
vicarious blood-atonement, or evolution. The 
one supreme discovery in all ages is to find 
Christ. The one chief and all-inclusive duty is 
to obey him. He gave a new commandment, 
clearly and unmistakably. It has nothing to do 
with dogmatic speculations or ecclesiastical for- 
malities. People may hold all kinds of views as 
to his birth, his nature, his resurrection, and 


THE CHURCH COURAGEOUS ~ 89 


his promised return, and yet may agree exactly 
in the only demand he ever made upon their 
loyalty to himself. The church has evaded 
this issue more or less successfully for nine- 
teen centuries, but it has succeeded in doing 
so largely through the ignorance of mankind. 
Some of that ignorance is passing away. The 
people to whom nine tenths at least of all 
Protestant preaching must be directed in the 
present generation are living in the midst of 
problems that cannot be successfully dealt with 
by medieval methods of theologizing or burn- 
ing at the stake. The church is at the parting 
of the ways, in this sense at least, that it must 
go on recruiting itself from a rapidly dimin- 
ishing part of the public alone, which can be 
depended upon for a few years longer perhaps 
to be influenced entirely by prejudice and 
tradition, or it must adapt its preaching and 
its methods to the conditions that actually 
exist. 

















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4 z ae Ay ie se Bide Ae Ai: si es BL: 

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ekoe Bee a Wai we? Haha \ sthitay ile) santa! tHe oN 
ioe tah ret Wie, 7 AsiiCy ee 3 pie if he i vs fey yi 
fei pyc fs ae ze ie seni Sy it 


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THE CHURCH IMPERIAL 


The saints cannot always distinguish between their econ- 
sciences and their self-wills. 
JONATHAN EDWARDS. 


I have never yet seen a synod that had a good ending, 
or one where the evils complained of were removed, but 
rather multiplied. For the spirit of dispute and the love 
of power (and do not think I am using too strong lan- 
guage) are exhibited there beyond all ability to describe. 

GREGORY OF NAZIANZUM, in a letter to the Emperor 
Theodosius. 


I, your fellow-servant, urge you to forgive each other 
equally for the unguarded question and the inconsiderate 
answer. It is a pity that the question was ever raised. 
No Christianity requires the investigation of such subjects. 
They arise from the eavils of ill-employed leisure. Few 
can understand these difficult matters, in which there should 
be mutual tolerance. In real things you are agreed. Re- 
turn to your former charity, and restore to me my quiet 
days and tranquil nights, or you will cause me to weep and 
to despair of any personal peace. 

CONSTANTINE, in a letter to Archbishop Alexander, 

A.D, 324. 


We worship one God in Trinity, neither confounaing 
the persons nor dividing the substance. And yet they are 
not three Eternals, but one Eternal; not three Almighties, 
but one Almighty. So the Father is God, the Son, God, and 
the Holy Ghost, God. And yet they are not three Gods 
but one God. The Father is made of none. The Son is 
of the Father alone; not created, but begotten. The Holy 
Ghost is of the Father and the Son; neither made nor 
created nor begotten, but proceeding. And in this Trinity, 
none is afore or after other. None is greater or less than 
other. But the whole three Persons are coeternal and co- 
equal. (Abridged.) 

ATTRIBUTED TO ATHANASIUS, but probably written by 
Bishop Vergilius of Africa, about the year 490. 


CHAPTER II 
THE CHURCH IMPERIAL 


HE first Christians were of Hebrew 

lineage, and the type of thought among 
them was of a strictly traditional character, 
but this does not mean that they were Old 
Testament Jews. Both their national and 
their religious life had been profoundly in- 
fluenced by centuries of Roman rule. Neither 
Pharisee nor Saddueee could have told where 
race loyalty left off and religion began. It 
was the fixed policy of the Roman Government 
not to interfere needlessly with the religion 
of a conquered race, but the character of the 
Hebrew religion and the stubbornness of the 
people had forced the rulers of Palestine to pay 
more attention to religious questions than was 
their custom in most of the provinces. Every 
gathering of a religious character was the pos- 


sible hotbed of a revolt. One of the most 
93 


94 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


difficult tasks that Jesus had to do was to con- 
vince people of the purely spiritual character 
of his work. Down to the time of his death, 
his most intimate companions found it im- 
possible to rid their minds of the fixed idea 
that there must be something political behind 
his teaching. 

The early church soon drifted away from the 
rigid Judaism of the first disciples. Most of 
the ministry of Jesus that is reported in the 
first three Gospels took place in Galilee, and 
his earliest disciples were almost exclusively 
Galileans. But when the persecutions arose 
after the death of Stephen, and the Christians 
were scattered, they did not turn to Galilee, 
where it would seem that the way was best 
prepared for continuing their work and estab- 
lishing new churches, but went to other places. 
The whole region of Galilee suddenly and com- 
pletely disappears from the narrative. We 
read of Peter in Jerusalem and Joppa, but not 
in Capernaum or Bethsaida. Sincerely de- 
voted to his own people as Paul was, he found 
the Gentiles uniformly easier to reach with the 
gospel. By the close of the century the church 


THE CHURCH IMPERIAL 95 


was so much a Gentile organization that the 
Hebrew terms quoted in the fourth Gospel 
were translated, and Jewish customs were ex- 
plained at length, to make the book compre- 
hensible to its readers. A century afterward 
it would have been almost as difficult to find 
a Hebrew Christian as it is to-day. 

Hebrew literature, however, maintained its 
place in the church with no _ perceptible 
diminution of influence. The Old Testament 
soon had more readers among Christians than 
among Jews. The Jewish Sabbath, the most 
fixed among all their institutions, gave way to 
the Christian Lord’s Day. Questions of sacri- 
fice, apocalyptic hopes, clean and unclean 
meats, and such periodic feasts as were not 
associated with Christian history soon dis- 
appeared. In place of them we find in the 
second and third centuries that Christian 
literature is permeated more and more with 
Greek speculations concerning the nature of 
Deity and the characteristics of the human 
soul. But the constant use by the Christians 
of the Old Testament, and the thoroughly He- 
brew character of the the New Testament 


96 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


writings, profoundly influenced this type of 
thought. The prevailing religious philosophy 
that arose was neither Greek nor Hebrew but 
somewhere in the region between them. 
Naturally the first development of this line 
of inquiry that reached the proportions of a 
church-wide movement dealt with the question 
of the nature of Christ. On the one hand there 
was the Hebrew idea of the Messiah, and on 
the other the various classical conceptions of 
demigods in human form, offsprings of deities 
and similiar speculations, in accordance with 
the almost universal tendency of the time to 
pay divine honors to exalted personalities of 
any kind, whether rulers or philosophers or 
saints. Out of it all there grew up year after 
year a kind of Christology that gradually 
shaped itself into a crude and primitive trini- 
tarianism, quite different from the refined and 
clear-cut philosophical conceptions of a century 
or two later. Various efforts to restate the 
Johannine and Pauline teachings concerning 
the nature of Christ in terms of the prevailing 
dialectics had reached a state of development 
by the close of the third century that was 


THE CHURCH IMPERIAL ai 


fairly satisfactory to the best minds of the 
church. This development was hastened by 
various heresies that arose, making it neces- 
sary for the scholars of the church to prepare 
formal statements of belief. The ancient 
heretic, like the modern variety, usually made 
a noise out of all proportion to the profundity 
of his thought or the importance of his follow- 
ing, but he had to be answered, nevertheless. 
About the year 318 a learned presbyter of 
Alexandria named Arius began writing books 
in criticism of what had come to be the pre- 
vailing view of the deity of Christ. He in- 
sisted that Scripture language will not bear 
such rigid interpretations as theologians were 
then using. His argument upon this negative 
point was well conducted, but he was not so 
happy in his efforts to state his own positive 
opinions. The general tendency of orthodox 
reasoning was to regard Christ as a single 
personality of double nature, both human and 
divine. Arius sought to avoid the duality of 
this conception of being, and at the same time 
to keep away from certain heretical specu- 
lations that had already been discussed and 


98 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


practically abandoned. His statements are 
not always clear, but possibly we do not mis- 
represent his position by saying that he re- 
garded the nature of Christ not as dual but 
partaking in absolute completeness and per- 
fection of all the qualities both of the human 
and of the divine; a nature entirely unique in 
the scale of being, defined in the fourth Gospel 
as the ‘‘only begotten.’’ It is somewhere be- 
tween the ‘‘tertium quid’’ of the older theolo- 
gians and the ‘‘God-man’’ of later schools of 
reasoning. The modern intelligence has dif- 
ficulty in comprehending the eagerness and 
anxiety with which the thinkers of the fourth 
century burrowed into such problems as these. 

The condition was exceptionally favorable 
at this time for staging a heresy trial in Egypt. 
Alexandria was rivaling Athens as an educa- 
tional center, with a type of religious phil- 
osophy more advanced than any other part of 
Christendom could show, while the important 
archdiocese of Alexandria was rigidly con- 
servative. If the atmosphere had been more 
favorable for free discussion, it is possible 
that the ideas of Arius might have been worked 


THE CHURCH IMPERIAL ae 


over among the able scholars of that favored 
city until a conclusion acceptable to them all 
was reached. 

It is interesting to note how another problem 
of far greater practical application was being 
worked out in this very manner, of free 
and open discussion, and at this same time. 
Various collections of the Christian writings 
had been made as the churches multiplied, in- 
cluding not only the books now in the New 
Testament, or most of them, but others also of 
pronounced spiritual character and some liter- 
ary merit. It became desirable to formulate 
some rule or ‘‘canon’’ to determine just what 
books should be regarded as authoritative. 
The ablest scholars of the church recognized 
this need. There was an abundance of discus- 
sion and some controversy, but the issue was 
never forced by any kind of ecclesiastical action. 
No council was called. There was no gather- 
ing of bishops and presbyters to thresh out 
disputed points in acrimonious debate. There 
were no patched-up agreements to admit one 
book on condition that another one be kept out. 
When at last the consensus of opinion seemed 


100 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


to warrant an authoritative statement of re- 
sults and the question came before the Councils 
of Hippo (a. v. 393) and of Carthage (a. p. 397), 
it was found that the whole church was in sub- 
stantial agreement. The question of the New 
Testament canon has never been reopened. No 
church heresy or division ever came up on this 
subject. A New Testament of twenty-six or of 
twenty-eight books has never been considered 
at all seriously since the fourth century in 
any part of Christendom. It required three 
centuries to settle this question, and every point 
was gone over again and again. A very wide- 
spread modern opinion exists that the inspired 
character of the genuine apostolic writings was 
so plain that there never was any difficulty 
from the beginning in deciding instantly be- 
tween the true and the false. This is an ut- 
terly mistaken idea. The church had all kinds 
of difficulty. But it kept at the problem, pa- 
tiently and carefully, year after year, until a 
satisfactory result was reached in a convincing 
and thoroughly satisfactory way. 
Unfortunately the earliest of the great theo- 
logical doctrines had a very different history. 


THE CHURCH IMPERIAL 101 


And as a consequence, theology embarked upon 
a course of development that never can lead to 
any exact knowledge and indeed can have no 
result except to provoke further controversy. 
Theology, if it is anything, is the science of 
religion. And no fact of science can ever be 
established by popular vote or authoritative 
action of any kind. Theories to account for 
spiritual facts must be established and proved 
in exactly the same manner that has always 
been used to establish theories that account for 
facts in the world of nature. Now and then 
the sun is suddenly blotted out at midday. 
How do we account for it? By act of Con- 
gress? By summoning a council of scientific 
men? A wicked man has a change of heart 
that shows itself in every act, not only, but also 
in every impulse of his after life. That also is 
a fact. Nobody can question it when the re- 
sults are exhibited. How do we account for 
it? We go away back in history, to a time 
when men believed that a demon swallowed the 
sun. We take their equally crude and unrea- 
sonable ideas of the science of religion, and we 
fight over them. We establish ecclesiastical 


102 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


bodies, build and endow great schools, spend 
millions and millions of dollars, in proving 
that it was just the kind of demon that our 
forefather imagined, and by no means the 
similar kind that our neighbor’s forefather 
dreamed of, that swallowed the sun, and only 
our kind of incantations and beating of pans 
can make him disgorge it. And in the mean- 
time, for four hundred years, with the world 
only one fourth nominally Christian, the church 
has been marking time, without winning a 
single nation that was not Christian four cen- 
turies ago. 

The controversy precipitated in Alexandria 
was not over a matter of religion at all. It 
had no bearing upon any question of Christian 
faith or manner of life. It was a purely 
philosophical inquiry into certain statements of 
Scripture, a search for the best opinion of the 
most competent scholarship of that age as to 
the question of the exact relations between 
Christ and the Father. The prevailing view, 
hardly yet definite enough to be called a 
doctrine, interpreted the Scriptures as mean- 


THE CHURCH IMPERIAL 103 


ing that the historic Jesus was the incarnate 
Son of God, in the sense that the Logos or 
‘‘Word’’ of the fourth Gospel was to be re- 
garded as a preéxistent, uncreated, personal be- 
ing, of the same divine substance as the Father 
and the Spirit. To the mind of Arius, this idea 
was incompatible with the attitude toward the 
Father that Jesus constantly showed. There 
is no reason to question the sincerity or the 
Christian spirit of Arius. He does not seem 
to have been a particularly controversial kind 
of man, though he was more fond of argument 
than he needed to be and was endowed by 
nature with positiveness of opinion. 
Alexander, the learned and pious Archbishop 
of Alexandria, also had positive opinions. He 
was an able scholar, he had given much time 
and thought to this very problem, and the pre- 
vailing view was thoroughly satisfactory to 
him. He held a position of great responsibil- 
ity, Moreover, and was charged with the duty 
of keeping peace in the church. Alexandria 
already had an unenviable notoriety as a center 
of liberal thinking, and the Archbishop was 


104 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


sensitive upon the subject. There were bats 
enough in the belfry now, without this new one. 
He summoned a council and silenced the offend- 
ing presbyter by removing him from office. 
The resulting ‘‘silence’’ was what we now 
call noise. In any other city this high-handed 
proceeding might have passed without notice, 
but Alexandria prided itself upon its progres- 
sive spirit. Friends of Arius took up the 
cudgel on his behalf. His writings began to 
be read in a wider circle than their own con- 
siderable merit would have secured for them 
in normal conditions. His not very novel 
view, that Christ could be worshiped as divine, 
and even as equal to the Father in the part 
that each takes in human redemption, without 
assuming mathematical equality at every 
point, became the common topic of conversa- 
tion wherever theologians foregathered. Five 
years before this time or five years after- 
ward it might have been possible to adjust 
these differences by the frank and orderly 
conference of scholars who had _ sufficient 
knowledge of the subject to carry on the dis- 
cussion intelligently. Whatever of reasonable- 


ve 


THE CHURCH IMPERIAL 105 


ness there was in the views of Arius might have 
been absorbed into the orthodox doctrine, 
softening some of its harsher features and 
thus advancing it one more step toward a com- 
plete and universal acceptability. And the un- 
soundness of other views that Arius held might 
have been demonstrated in a manner so satis- 
factory that he and his friends would unhesitat- 
ingly have abandoned them. 

It so happened, however, that this purely 
academic question was suddenly shifted into an 
entirely different atmosphere. Events were 
taking place a thousand miles away, destined to 
exert a profound influence not only upon re- 
ligious questions but upon the whole problem 
of human civilization. A great soldier had 
seen, or said he had, a cross in the sky, with 
an inscription pointing out the way to victory. 
He became the first Christian Emperor. The 
religion that had been despised and then tol- 
erated now became an object of supreme im- 
portance among the great men of the earth. 
Eeclesiastical problems, hitherto the exclusive 
interest of churchmen, were now drawn into 
politics and came under the rules of state- 


106 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


craft. In some way the case of Arius was 
brought to the attention of Constantine. 
Among the unsolved problems of history we 
may include the question whether Constantine 
was a Christian at all, in any adequate sense 
of the term. Giving him the benefit of the 
doubt, and we must say that he shows up quite 
as well as some modern specimens whom we 
have known, his conviction is entirely reason- 
able that Christianity, being his religion, was 
now the religion of the Empire, and he was 
Pontifex Maximus of the new faith as his 
predecessors had been of the old. It was the 
fault of Constantine’s Ohristian instructors 
rather than his own that he did not better un- 
derstand the difference between Christianity 
and Roman heathenism. As soon as he could 
find the time, the Emperor turned his august 
attention to the tempest brewing in the Alex- 
andrian tea-pot, and thereby lifted an inquiry 
that very few people outside of Egypt had ever 
heard of quite out of its local environment 
and made it a matter of imperial policy. 
Among many things that stand to Constantine’s 
credit on the pages of history we should never 


THE CHURCH IMPERIAL 107 


fail to notice the fact that before proceeding 
to official action he made a temperate and 
kindly effort to bring the parties in this dispute 
to a friendly adjustment of their misunder- 
standings. 

Constantine could lead armies and rule 
states, but when it came to dealing with theo- 
logians he had many things to learn. One 
of them was the fact that a religious con- 
troversy, undertaken for the glory of God, has 
a remarkable facility for getting away from the 
main issue and running off at a tangent. No- 
body who has. had any experience in modern 
theological disputes and heresy trials will be 
surprised to learn that the question now under 
consideration was miles away from the original 
proposition of Arius. The whole controversy 
began in a philosophical inquiry as to the 
nature of Deity. But as the orthodox party 
now looked upon the matter, Arius had at- 
tacked the honor of Christ. He was trying to 
degrade the Saviour of mankind, who had led 
Constantine to victory, by taking away from 
him a part of his divine nature. Arius, after 
accepting the benefits of so great sacrifice, had 


108 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


turned upon his Master like Judas, ete., ete. 
How familiar it all sounds! As one reads 
parts of this ancient history he really ques- 
tions sometimes whether he is in the fourth or 
the twentieth century. 

It is of course needless to say that no such 
ideas had ever entered the mind of Arius. 
The worst that can be said of him as to his own 
attitude toward Christ is that he regarded 
obedience as the greatest honor that can be 
paid to the second Person in the Trinity, with- 
out the necessity of going beyond the simplest 
and plainest meaning of the passages in Scrip- 
ture that speak of his past and future glory. 

It is exceedingly unfortunate that Constan- 
tine did not see another sign in the sky about 
this time, pointing out a better way than the 
one he actually chose. He was a soldier and 
a statesman, and he believed conscientiously 
in the strong arm of the law. Pontifex 
Maximus though he was, he modestly ques- 
tioned his ability to decide a point like this, 
that seemed to have set the whole Christian 
church by the ears. He determined to sum- 
mon a council of all the bishops in the Empire 


THE CHURCH IMPERIAL 109 


and to submit to them the question of the 
nature and being of God. 

This historic Council, destined to give a most 
unfortunate precedent for the disposal of sub- 
sequent theological disputes, met in the year 
325 in the city of Nicea, near Constantinople. 
Arius was there to present his views, though he 
did not remain through all the sittings. The 
defense of the traditional position fell princi- 
pally upon Athanasius, a brilliant and talented 
young deacon, also of Alexandria. Naturally 
the bishops, summoned by imperial edict, 
made the most of the occasion. People all 
over the Empire began to think of this discus- 
sion among theologians as the very gist of all 
Christian hope for mankind. To settle it at 
once, which to nine out of ten sincere Christians 
of course meant to support the orthodox po- 
sition and thus to save the church from wreck, 
became the great question of the hour. It 
seemed to many as if the time had actually 
come when men could be made wise by edict, 
rather than by the tedious and not always suc- 
cessful method of cultivating their own brains. 
The question before the Council of Nicea was 


110 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


exceedingly simple. It was to make a baby- 
doctrine into a man-doctrine in thirty days, in 
spite of the fact that the Almighty himself 
never has done this, and never tries to do it, in 
less than thirty years. They were summoned 
to decide a matter at once and for all the 
future, that no human intelligence in the world 
at that time, in the Council or outside of it, 
was sufficiently clarified to comprehend even if 
it had been perfectly explained. 

It must be said for this famous Council that 
though all the forensic arts and policies were 
used, just as in other ancient assemblies, there 
was a very evident desire to be fair to both 
parties. The 318 bishops who sat out the de- 
bates seem to have been animated by a sin- 
cere purpose to decide the case before them 
strictly upon its merits and to be influenced as 
little as possible by the complications that had 
gathered around the original proposition. 
They hoped to be able to formulate a doctrine 
in such clear and definite terms that no other 
disturbance of this kind could ever come up in 
the future to mar the peace of the church. 

This, unfortunately, is what no three hun- 


THE CHURCH IMPERIAL 111 


dred bishops, or three millions of them, sitting 
in council, will ever be able to do. Doctrines 
that are never to be questioned are not made 
in any such way. One course was open to them 
that might have led to peace, but no one 
thought of it. They represented the best 
scholarship in the church at that time. If they 
had repudiated all claim to have authority to 
decide a question of this kind, and had sought 
a frank consensus of opinion that would have 
represented the best judgment of the year 
325 on this subject, it is possible that the church 
even at that early period might have proved in- 
telligent enough to accept their decision at least 
temporarily and to abide by their view without 
further controversy until more light was given. 
This, however, was not what the bishops were 
called together to do. They were summoned 
to Nicea to hear two opinions on the nature of 
Deity, neither of which was wholly true or 
wholly false. They were to decide by vote 
which of the two views was on the whole the 
nearer true, with the smaller measure of error. 
Then they must put that view forth, with the 
full authority of the church, as absolute and 


112 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


perfect truth, not to be questioned forever. 
The bishops had a hard task. They deserve 
our sympathy rather than our criticism. We 
frankly admit that we are hardly wise enough 
ourselves to formulate such a doctrine in a sat- 
isfactory way. 

The records are not quite clear as to the vote, 
whether thirteen, seventeen, or twenty-two of 
the bishops finally supported the Arian view. 
The one thing clearly evident is the fact that 
exactly the same result would have been reg- 
istered, and by about the same majority, if 
each bishop had cast his vote before leaving 
home. And if the whole question before them 
could be reopened to-day and put to the vote 
of Christendom, it is very probable that the 
minority would still fall somewhere between 
the four and the seven per cent of the final 
vote at Nicea. 

Even after this, there was still a chance for 
peace. The victory of the conservative party 
had been so complete that all danger of serious 
dissension on this subject might be considered 
at an end. Arius had had his day in court, 
such as it was, and even the marked preference 


THE CHURCH IMPERIAL 113 


of the Emperor himself for his views had 
failed to stem the tide. There was no occasion 
to impose penalties, or to draw the line of ex- 
clusion with severity. Yet this is exactly what 
the Council did. They knew of only one way to 
secure a permanent peace, and that was the Ro- 
man fashion of not leaving enough survivors 
to start another insurrection. We should not 
blame the bishops for acting according to their 
light. We would do better to inquire whether, 
in such matters, we are not still living by 
their light rather than by our own. Whenever 
the human mind falls into a fear that sound 
truth cannot fight its own way in the world, 
but must be artificially shored up by authority 
lest error prove the stronger of the two, the 
same results will follow as followed the Council 
of Nicea. The Arians were hunted like wild 
beasts. Wars were fought over this question 
of the deity of Christ. And of course Arian- 
ism grew enormously. All other heresies, 
some of them already half forgotten, combined 
under this name, and in a few years Arius him- 
self could not have recognized many of the 
doctrines that he was credited with. At sev- 


114 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


eral times in the next few centuries it seems 
as if almost half of Christendom was Arian. 
Not until the last of the wars with the Arian 
Goths, in the seventh century, was this ques- 
tion finally quieted through the subjugation of 
the Arian part of Central and Southern Europe 
by the orthodox half. 

The Council provided also for the prepara- 
tion of a creedal statement, though the one 
that was formulated was afterward twice re- 
vised. In reality four creeds grew out of the 
discussions at Nicea; the Original Nicene 
Creed, the Revised Creed of the Council of 
Constantinople, the second revision by the 
Council of Chalcedon, and the so-called 
Athanasian Creed whose history cannot be ac- 
curately traced. It is a mistake to suppose 
that any of these is original, for they all copy 
the language of other less formal creeds that 
had been in use before the year 325. For many 
centuries every Christian in the world was ex- 
pected to fit his reasoning powers, or his abil- 
ity to believe without reasoning, into one or 
another of these historic statements of the com- 
mon faith. Our present view of them may be 


THE CHURCH IMPERIAL 115 


expressed in very general terms as a common 
agreement that they are historic documents of 
great value, marking definite stages in the evo- 
lution of theological opinion. It is not at all 
probable that we could improve them, for 
ours is not a creed-making age. They come 
a good deal nearer the truth than any sincere 
soul will ever need to come in order to be a 
thoroughly acceptable Christian believer. But 
they require an immense amount of interpreta- 
tion in these modern days, far more than the 
Scriptures upon the same subjects have ever 
required or ever will. 

The dozen centuries that lie between the 
Nicene Council and the Reformation cover the 
formative period of the modern European, 
Colonial, and American civilizations. The 
Greek-speaking and the Latin-speaking 
churches separated. After the fall of Rome 
the Western or Latin church entered the 
period called the Dark Ages, a time of great 
mental and moral deterioration. And yet it 
was a time of rapid and permanent growth. It 
is not a proposition that ministers in a pleas- 
ant way to the vanity of Christendom, but the 


116 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


historie fact is the church never grew so rap- 
idly and so permanently as it did in the two 
darkest moral periods of its history, at the 
close of the first century and in the years that 
followed the fall of the Roman Empire. 

To understand this we must go back to the 
beginning. The church of the Apostles’ days 
was small and weak. It suffered from perse- 
cutions, both Jewish and heathen, that culled 
out the unspiritual elements, leaving only the 
believers who had exceptional faith and cour- 
age. Under the stimulus of a new and strik- 
ing experience, these first Christians developed 
a type of life that was wonderful in its con- 
secration and power. But it was an abnormal 
condition of the church. The high-grade 
Christian is the very choicest treasure that 
humanity can show. A church made up ex- 
clusively of such would be a unit of incalculable 
possibilities for immediate service, and this is 
what many of those early churches were. But 
nothing can be plainer than the fact that no 
such organization was contemplated by the 
Master as the permanent working force in his 
kingdom. The real church of Christ is not 


THE CHURCH IMPERIAL 117 


an exhibit of religious prodigies. It is a home 
where the sick and the imperfect and the un- 
developed and the sinful all have their places. 
The essential qualification of a living church is 
not the high mental and spiritual average of 
its membership, any more than the essential 
feature of a home is the maturity and perfect 
health of all who dwell there. The greatest 
question that can be asked of a real church of 
Christ is the question what it is doing for 
those, at any stage in their Christian develop- 
ment, into whose lives it has brought the uplift 
and encouragement of a genuine Christian 
faith. 

At first sight it might seem that there was a 
sad deterioration in real Christianity when we 
compare the enthusiastic and warm-hearted 
brotherhood of the Pentecost church, sharing 
their goods and breaking their holy bread in 
brotherly joy, with the seven churches in the 
Apocalypse. For many centuries we have been 
praising the former and apologizing for the 
latter variety of church life. Of course there 
may have been a real decline in this case, but 
there is nothing in the record to prove that it 


118 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


was not a very long step upward. Led by the 
Spirit of God, the early Christians soon put it 
out of the power of the church to keep up the 
Pentecostal grade of moral and spiritual blame- 
lessness. They realized that if the Master’s 
command to evangelize the world was to be car- 
ried out, and the new convert, from such moral 
surroundings and influences as he had been sub- 
ject to, was to be taken into fellowship and 
nurtured like the spiritual babe that he was, the 
church would be ruined as a dress-parade of the 
delectable Christian virtues. The very first 
steps they would take to obey their Master 
must necessarily put them into a condition to- 
ward which the scoffing world could point the 
finger of scorn. This result actually followed. 
It is the way the world judged the church in 
those days, and the world applies exactly the 
same kind of judgment to-day. So a human 
home is always ruined as a comfortable place 
of selfish ease when a baby is born there. 
Many people prefer a home without a baby, 
never having had one, and many churches are 
proud of their clean record and high-grade 


THE CHURCH IMPERIAL 119 


membership. An exclusive church, made up of 
‘‘the very best people’’ only, is a clear case 
of spiritual race suicide. It is an ecclesiastical 
steerage, filled with immigrants from other or- 
ganizations that are alive. 

There are worse things in church history 
than the crude moral character of the work 
they were doing in the Dark Ages. Rome had 
fallen. Such civilization as the world had 
known disappeared. Rank, wicked, and cruel 
heathenism was at the door, and out of it the 
church was to build the highest type of social, 
moral, and intellectual life that this world has 
ever seen. This task could not be done in a 
single generation. In fact, it is not completed 
yet, though something very substantial along 
that line has been accomplished. The church 
was full of false theologies and worldly am- 
bitions. Its type of moral character was cer- 
tainly very far indeed from the Christian 
ideals. But it believed that the first duty of 
the hour was to make Western Europe Chris- 
tian. And it went at the task in a sensible and 
practical way. 


120 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


We have not had occasion to trace out the 
development of the episcopal and papal forms 
of government from the second to the sixth 
century. From the Protestant point of view 
the military character of this government, par- 
ticularly after the fall of Rome, was open to 
serious criticism. We have abundant histori- 
eal proof of many evils that grew out of the ar- 
bitrary use of civil power for the advancement 
of religion. But when we try to imagine the 
church of the seventh and eighth centuries ad- 
ministered according to the pussy-foot policies 
imposed upon the average American clergyman 
by the elderly maiden saints of both sexes un- 
der his charge, the historian must turn aside 
and smile. They were doing a man’s job in 
those days, and tender consciences could not 
always be considered. The sewing-circle was 
literally not in it. When the Nicene Council 
met, the Latin church was confined practically 
to its own part of the Empire, and only favored 
sections of that could be called Christian. 
Shortly after the close of the Dark Ages there 
was not a nation in Hurope that was not evan- 
gelized almost, if not quite, up to the Roman 


THE CHURCH IMPERIAL 121 


model. And no nation in any part of the world 
has been made Christian since. It is interest- 
ing to note that the missionary work done by 
the Arian heretics was of the same general 
character as that of the orthodox church. It 
seemed impossible to convince those people 
that they were ruining the reputation of the 
Nicene Council for inspired wisdom by acting 
so much like ordinary and properly certified 
Christians. 

Like Peter and John at the gate, the church 
of those days had nothing to give in the way of 
a refined and enlightened religion, but such as it 
had it freely gave. It was a raw civilization 
that developed, but it had in it the seeds of 
modern Christianity. Some things were taught 
in the name of Christ that the religion of the 
twentieth century must repudiate. But some 
other things were taught that it might be well 
for modern Protestantism to think about. The 
rich and the poor met together. The high and 
the low had one place of assembly, one form of 
worship, one doctrine. The great cathedrals 
were not built for rich men and scholars to wor- 
ship in, with a modest mission for poor folk 


122 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


down the alley. The papacy was growing more 
and more arrogant, and the morals of the great 
religious houses will not bear close investiga- 
tion. But no Christian was ever taught in 
those days that he was too good to worship side 
by side with any other Christian in the world. 

Following the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, or 
Revival of Learning, extends to the time of 
the Reformation. It forms the closing part of 
the medieval period, separating the modern 
from the ancient world. The one feature of 
these four or five centuries that is of inter- 
est to us is the development of thought that is 
called Scholasticism. We may define it in the 
most general terms as the effort to reach in- 
tellectual certainty not by the modern sci- 
entific method, the tabulation of phenomena, 
but by study of the operations of the human 
mind. Material things were looked upon by the 
Schoolmen, or scholars of the period, with sus- 
picion, as belonging to a world that is evil in 
its nature and is rapidly passing away. Many 
of the best thinkers of the period from the 
tenth to the sixteenth centuries seriously ques- 
tioned whether there is any such thing as a 


THE CHURCH IMPERIAL 123 


material universe, or whether all that our five 
Senses perceive is not a creation of the intel- 
lect. This is a very old type of mental gym- 
nastics, and probably will always serve as a 
foundation for queer religions. In the time of 
the medieval Schoolmen, however, it was al- 
most a universal type of philosophy. The 
tendency of scholastic thought was toward a 
conviction that real and lasting truth cannot 
be built upon a foundation so uncertain and so 
Insecure as things that are here to-day and gone 
to-morrow. We can know things only by the 
rules of logic, which cannot be changed and 
must be the same in the next world as they are 
in this world. 

It is easy to perceive what kind of work this 
type of thinking would make when it came to 
the interpretation of Scripture. But it is not 
so easy for any one but a careful student of 
history to realize what a profound influence 
Scholasticism actually had in the development 
of human thought in the next three or four 
centuries. The honors, titles, and degrees in 
all our institutions of higher learning are 
purely scholastic, and based upon the ifea of 


124 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


privilege while the whole impulse of modern 
education is the search for power. We still 
present to the college graduate an ill-smelling 
sheepskin, purporting to give him admission to 
certain privileges of the learned that have not 
been in existence for centuries. The graduate 
himself would care nothing for the privileges, 
even if they could be secured, for his object in 
seeking an education is entirely practical. 
Modern learning is built upon _ scholastic 
foundations, but it has gone on growing until 
it has left the foundations out of sight. 
Modern religion, however, is still living in 
the basement. It is all foundation, and nothing 
else. We are afraid to loose our hold upon the 
‘‘fyndamentals’’ of religion, to adopt the pres- 
ent phraseology, lest we lose our souls. All 
the historic creeds and the systems of faith 
that are built upon them, all our distinctly 
Christian types of thinking and teaching and 
literature, perpetuate the medieval thought, no 
matter how skilfully they may be clothed in 
modern words. Their ideas of certainty are 
entirely different from the ideas that we hold 
with respect to all other subjects in the world 


THE CHURCH IMPERIAL 125 


except religion. Our conception of ordinary 
certainty is proof. Our conception of religious 
certainty is certification. When an Hinstein 
arises and demands that we abolish the New- 
tonian theory of gravitation, we do not burn 
him at the stake; we do not even cast him out 
of presbytery or conference. We tell him to 
hire his hall, and we will come and listen as 
long as we can spare the time. But when a 
modern scholar suggests that our religion 
would be improved in this or that respect by a 
change of opinion, we call for the bishops to 
rise and crush him. He is endangering souls. 
We don’t want to hear him. The simple truth 
is, fully half of our modern Christendom is 
actually afraid to consider his views at all. 
This accounts for the fact that to so many 
people to-day, particularly to those of liberal 
education, the whole subject of religion has an 
air of unreality. Six days in the week they do 
their thinking by modern rules. We all use 
those rules, though we do not stop to reason 
them out. We admit that phenomena may be 
deceptive, but we have perfect trust in the laws 
that are behind the phenomena. We are not 


126 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


surprised when we learn that the balloon rises 
by exactly the same law that makes the apple 
fall. And where the law that we have been 
believing fails to work, we demand that those 
whose business it is to look after such things 
shall give us a better law. We think we know a 
great deal in these days, but we hold all that 
we know subject to possible correction and 
improvement. 

On Sunday these same people go to church 
and find themselves in a different world. It is 
not so much that they hear of creation in six 
days and of the sun standing still and of men 
a thousand years old or strong as elephants 
and of devils entering into swine. Intelligent 
people are not so seriously disturbed by these 
characteristic phenomena of ancient records 
as they are supposed to be. These things are 
dismissed as matters of psychology, hardly 
worth the trouble of forming theories about. 
Nor are these people perplexed at the occa- 
sional revival of controversy on such matters of 
science as were emphasized half a century or 
more ago, for they know that modern students 
of the natural sciences are no longer living in 


THE CHURCH IMPERIAL 127 


the world of Darwin, Mill, Huxley, Tyndall, and 
other names that have had the honor of being 
pilloried in some ancient pulpits. 

It is not the unusual or the miraculous or 
the unscientific matters in religious narrative 
that trouble the intelligent worshiper to-day, 
but rather the very sum and substance, the 
whole warp and woof of our current religious 
life. What is it all for? What is the church 
trying to do? Why does it carry so much un- 
necessary baggage, and keep unburied so many 
dead issues? No intelligent Christian now be- 
lieves, with any seriousness at all, in the rigid 
historic lines that divide modern denominations 
from one another, filling our communities with 
a host of petty organizations, scarcely able in 
the general rivalry to keep going year after 
year, and certainly never going to be able to 
do the work that we all know belongs to the 
church of the Lord Jesus Christ in such times 
as these. This being the case, and everybody 
beyond the mental stage of a six-year-old child 
knowing it is the case, why do we keep it up? 
We can think of Samson, blinded by the 
Philistines and grinding in their mill. But 


128 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


this new Samson has put out his own eyes in 
order to be permitted to grind in his enemies’ 
mill, subject to their ill-bred derision. 

The answer to these questions is very simple. 
Without denominationalism, no Christian has 
any right whatever to carry in his secret heart 
the flattering belief that he is a little wiser and 
better and nearer the truth than any other kind 
of Christian, or even than this publican. 
Moreover, without it no preacher of the gospel 
has even his present starvation assurance of a 
living, and no church in America can hold a 
foot of its property by law. Millions and mil- 
lions of dollars are inyested in _ schools, 
churches, newspapers, publishing-houses, ab- 
solutely dependent upon teaching some type of 
religious belief that in no case is held by more 
than five per cent of Christendom. The civil 
laws in most of our States are such as to put 
it in the power of a mere handful of people, 
by standing firmly together, to force these en- 
dowed religious institutions to keep on in their 
present exact type of teaching, even though 
nine tenths of the real scholarship in that de- 
nomination itself, and nine tenths also of the 


THE CHURCH IMPERIAL 129 


people who are financially supporting it, no 
longer hold these ancient traditions. 

That is the kind of strangle-hold that sec- 
tarianism has upon the church to-day. We 
shall have occasion to note, in the next chapter, 
how sectarianism obtained that hold. The 
Protestant Reformation is not the only occa- 
sion in the history of the church that called for 
courage and independence. We note here only 
the simple fact that this condition in the main 
_ grows out of the effort to conduct our religious 
life by medieval thinking, while we shape our 
ordinary and secular life by a different kind of 
thinking altogether. 

There is an old and respectable theory, held 
still by many people in America, that hogs 
should be butchered in a certain phase of the 
moon, to make the bacon lie straight in the pan. 
Tell a modern farmer that, and if he has gone 
to school in these days he instantly asks 
‘“Why?’? His thinking machinery turns in- 
stinctively to the question. But three cen- 
turies ago not one man in a hundred, not one 
educated man in ten, would have asked such 
a question at all. He would have taken the 


130 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


fact for granted, because everybody thought 
that way, and in all his life he never had known 
hogs to be butchered in any other phase in the 
moon. The time was when it was easy to make 
people believe that there is somewhere above 
the sky a Deity who will condemn to eternal 
torment those who had a chance of knowing 
better but who persisted in believing the wrong 
doctrine about bishops or baptism or foreor- 
dination or free grace or ecstatic conversion or 
psalm-singing or a score of other equally im- 
portant coruscations of religious philosophy. 
Did anybody ask, ‘‘Why?’’ Did anybody turn 
to the four Gospels, or the Epistles, to learn 
what they said about the kind of God we have? 
Certainly not. What is the use? Here are 
great churches, with thousands of the wisest 
men in their membership, and the king, per- 
haps, and the college president; and they all 
believe it. It was the medieval type of reason- 
ing. We no longer use it except in religion. 
The scholastic search for absolute truth did 
not distinguish between things that are es- 
sential and things that are non-essential, if 
they came equally under the laws of logical 


THE CHURCH IMPERIAL 131 


thought. The time was, and not a great while 
ago, when the laws of most Christian nations 
provided the same death penalty for sheep- 
stealing as for murder. There were not 
enough of the severe penalties to go around. 
When a woman was burned alive at the stake in 
England only a little more than two centuries 
ago, for no other crime than the giving of food 
to a starving fugitive from Monmouth’s army, 
it was possible for men to worship with all 
_ their hearts the kind of a God that our histori- 
cal systems of theology describe, against 
whose wrath they issue their most serious warn- 
ings. If anybody had questioned the decision 
of Judge Jeffreys in the case of that woman, 
he would have been told by clergy and laity 
alike that it was unfortunate, of course, but 
really if crime like that is not severely punished 
the king’s throne would be unsafe, and the lib- 
erties of England might be utterly destroyed. 
The throne of England and its liberties happen 
to rest upon a very different kind of basis in 
these modern days, but intelligent people are 
supposed to force their brains into the same old 
and outworn ways of thinking about God’s 


132 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


throne and Christian liberty. We are not ad- 
vocating any doctrine of God that takes away 
a particle of his infinite justice, his hatred of 
evil and hypocrisy, or his established and im- 
mutable decrees that insure the penalties of all 
wrong-doing. No loyal Englishman would 
consent to-day to hold an allegiance to his 
king so weak as to make light of treason. 
But certainly no English king could hold his 
throne for an hour if he should permit what 
James II permitted in Judge Jeffreys’s time. 
The perplexing times through which we are 
passing just now bring this result at least, that 
they have set us to thinking in twentieth-century 
dimensions. The demand is thoroughly loyal 
to Scripture and reverent in spirit which insists 
on measuring religious truths according to rela- 
tive importance, just as we measure all other 
truths and grade them into greater and less. 
The time is not ripe for a general exodus from 
creeds. It is a prudent rule not to jump until 
we have a little better idea than we can have 
just now where we are going to alight. But 
we certainly have advanced far enough in rea- 
sonable ideas of Christian truth to inquire 


THE CHURCH IMPERIAL 133 


into the causes that have kept the church 
warring over creeds and idly witnessing gi- 
gantic wrongs for four of the best centuries 
that the world ever saw. Sane and reverent 
scholarship may not be ready, at the present 
moment, to formulate even the outline of a 
better organization of the church. But the 
fact that our present organizations are an- 
tiquated and hopelessly inadequate cannot be 
questioned by any one who lives outside the 
bounds of complacent bigotry. 





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THE CHURCH DIVIDED 


The notion that recognition of certain dogmas is the 
essential condition of salvation lies at the bottom of all 
intoierance in matters of religion. 

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 


The essence of our religion is peace and harmony. These 
can exist only where there are few dogmas, and each indi- 
vidual is left to form his own opinion on many matters. 

ERASMUS. 


The bloody hate of Christendom, for the amelioration 
of which human wisdom ean find no means, which grows 
daily worse and worse, flows from no other source than the 
disunity of religion. 

WuaDIsuav, King of Poland, a.p. 1645. 


I do not know which of the two opinions is the more 
unfounded: the Protestant view of a glorious Reformation 
upon which all our civil liberties are based, or the Catholic 
view of a wicked rebellion inspired by Satanic influences. 

W. KE. OrcHARD. 


It is a most significant cireumstance that no large so- 
ciety of which the tongue is not Teutonic has ever turned 
Protestant, and that wherever a language derived from that 
of ancient Rome is spoken, the religion of Rome to this 
day prevails. 

T. B. Macaunay. 


Sometimes I venture to think we have lost Christ al- 
together. We believe in a church that can be manipulated 
by human wisdom. We believe in a church that can be 
galvanized by organization. But we do not believe in a 
church whose development is being overruled by the guid- 
ing spirit and eternal presence of Christ himself. 

Wiuu1am Boyp CARPENTER. 


CHAPTER III 
THE CHURCH DIVIDED 


VERY common error in the reading of 

history is to fall under slavery to dates. 
Because two events are separated by a consid- 
erable number of years, it does not always fol- 
low that a proportionate advance has been 
made in human affairs. The great movements 
that build up civilization usually go by im- 
pulses of widely differing intensities, and sep- 
arated by periods of inaction or decline. The 
dozen years, for instance, between the work of 
John the Baptist and that of St. Paul actually 
made more history than the dozen centuries 
that followed the writing of the fourth Gospel. 
When the translators produced our Authorized 
English Bible in the year 1611 they were mov- 
ing on the crest of a wave. A certain kind of 
Scripture study, by the minute and painstak- 
ing comparison of texts, was nearing its cul- 


mination. The present age is on the upward 
137 


138 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


trend of another wave, which we may best 
describe as the study of Scripture in perspec- 
tive. It is the effort to get the point of view 
that the writer himself had when he produced 
his part of the sacred narrative. A great 
light has been thrown upon Scriptural times 
and methods of thought. Necessarily a large 
part of this research has been given to critical 
examination of former beliefs, and the grounds, 
or lack of grounds, that they stood upon. 
When it becomes distinctly constructive study, 
telling us less what it does not believe and 
more what it believes, we shall see a revival 
of interest in. the sacred writings far beyond 
anything that the world has yet known. It 
may be that the time never will come when the 
Hinglish Parliament will be able to quote the 
language of Scripture so voluminously as it 
did in the days of Cromwell and Praise-God 
Barebones. But when our children and grand- 
children quote Scripture they will know a good 
deal better what it means. 

Because the Protestant Reformation came 
four centuries ago, many people think of it as 
about one fifth of the way back to the New 


THE CHURCH DIVIDED 139 


Testament. It would give a much clearer idea 
of conditions if we should call it four fifths of 
the way. It is only by an effort that we, in 
these strenuous days, can realize how little of 
actual progress had been made in religion 
since the New Testament times, fourteen cen- 
turies before, and how very ignorant and prej- 
udiced the Reformers’ religion really was. A 
romantic glamour has been thrown over those 
heroic days, obscuring the large part that per- 
sonal conceit and half-way learning had to do 
in shaping the new ecclesiasticisms that grew 
up after the separation from Rome. Our ad- 
miration for the courage of the Reformers 
makes us a little blind to their faults, particu- 
larly to that very common failing among 
courageous people, contentiousness. They 
were human like ourselves, and the fact that 
they had the kind of convictions that put down 
abuses and inaugurated needed reforms does 
not mean that they had the necessary breadth 
of vision to construct iron-bound and perpetu- 
ally authoritative theologies for another age 
and a very different condition of humanity four 
centuries later. 


140 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


For two hundred years thoughtful men all 
over Central and Western Europe had been 
questioning whether the gigantic and elabo- 
rately organized Roman church was fitly repre- 
senting the work of Jesus Christ for mankind. 
Corruptions of the most serious character had 
come in. The scandals that had culminated in 
the removal of the papal court from Italy to 
France, resulting in two rival popes, had set 
people to thinking along new lines. With our 
modern ideas of missionary work, we think we 
can see occasion for a large part of this decline 
in the fact that when the church had finally 
evangelized the last of the Kuropean peoples 
it lost its missionary zeal and turned to the 
political exploitation of the territory it had 
won. Possibly we over-magnify this mission- 
ary idea. Whatever the cause or causes may 
be, the outstanding fact in the thirteenth, four- 
teenth, and fifteenth centuries was the great 
increase of the church in wealth and civil 
power, and its moral and spiritual decline. 

‘‘See, Thomas,’’ said Pope Urban IV, as he 
was showing the papal treasures to Aquinas, 
‘‘the church can no longer say with Peter 


THE CHURCH DIVIDED 141 


and John, ‘Silver and gold have I none.’ ’’ 
‘‘True, your Holiness,’’ replied Thomas, ‘‘and 
neither can she say any more to the lame man, 
‘Rise up and walk.’ ”’ 

In the year 1517 Martin Luther, an Augustin- 
lan monk, nailed upon the church-door in 
Wittenberg the famous Ninety-five Theses, 
that every one has heard of and very few 
have read. Even the most progressive think- 
ers in those days never thought of forming an- 
other church, but only of correcting certain 
objectionable features of the church that they 
had. The modern panacea for all religious 
grievances, to withdraw and set up a rival 
church across the street, had not been discov- 
ered. A few people here and there knew that 
there had been a division centuries before be- 
tween the Greek and the Latin catholicisms, but 
not one in ten thousand had ever seen a Greek 
church or thought of Christianity as anything 
but purely papal. From the lower Danube to 
the Hebrides it would have been about as easy 
for the average Christian believer to form a 
mental picture of another Christ as of another 
church. The one thing more than all others 


142 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


that shows the really revolutionary character 
of the movement inaugurated by Luther is the 
fact that within a single generation people did 
become accustomed to think of the church of 
Christ in less than world dimensions. No 
change that came in theology or church gov- 
ernment or ideas of Scripture or ecclesiastical 
practice was so radical and so far-reaching as 
this one. 

The pope, who had said of the church-door 
incident that it was only the prank of a drunken 
monk who would think better of it when he had 
slept himself sober, soon found that it was a 
more serious matter than that. A bull of ex- 
communication was issued, which Luther pub- 
licly burned. The courageous Reformer was 
then summoned to an imperial diet at Worms 
and was afterwards kept in retirement for a 
time by one of his influential friends. As the 
church put forth its power, it became more and 
more evident what a hold the papacy had upon 
the mind and heart of Europe. Luther had 
seized upon the sale of indulgences by Tetzel as 
the basis of his first complaint. Rome soon put 
it out of his power to build upon a grievance 


THE CHURCH DIVIDED 143 


so readily compromised as that. And it be- 
came the easiest thing in the world to start 
friars and parish priests all over Hurope to 
lamenting that this university professor, with 
the arrogance of a little learning, was endan- 
gering the souls of all who heard him by turn- 
ing them away from their only chance of sal- 
vation through the ministries of Holy Church. 
It is the one appeal that can always be made 
successfully to the more contentious and ag- 
gressive types of ignorance. ‘‘Learning’’ is 
endangering souls to-day in just the same 
manner. 

We cannot enter into a detailed history of the 
Reformation. Not since the days of the Apos- 
tles had events of such vital moment moved 
so rapidly or so far. But the changes that 
were made were in the external forms rather 
than in the vital spirit of religion. The purely 
papal doctrines which had been the chief 
causes of complaint were rejected, and a great 
many formal statements of belief were recast 
into language more in accord with current 
thought. But the ideals and principles of 
scholastic theology were kept practically un- 


144 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


changed. In all that they regarded as really 
essential truth, the Reformers were very con- 
servative. They made such changes as they 
felt were absolutely necessary, but there they 
stopped. No man can cut himself entirely 
loose from his own past, and especially from 
habits of thought formed in his own childhood. 
All things considered, the Reformers made an 
immense stride toward a more reasonable view 
of religion, but measured over against the 
advances made since that time, their religion 
was still very primitive indeed. A common 
idea of the Protestant Reformation, held by 
many people to-day, regards it as the complete 
overthrow of a corrupt perversion of Christian- 
ity, and the substitution of a new and perfect 
interpretation of the teachings of Christ and 
the Apostles, based upon the Bible, the whole 
Bible, and nothing but the Bible. This is so 
plainly and palpably unhistorical that we 
should waste time trying to disprove it. 

The forms of church organization were 
changed. Systems of church government that 
had not been in use for fifteen centuries, if 
they ever had been used at all, were loaded 


THE CHURCH DIVIDED 145 


upon certain passages of Scripture that 
groaned under their weight, and adopted. But 
the Reformers’ ideas of what a church really 
is, how it obtains its authority, and what it can 
do for the believer in the way of insuring his 
final passage to the right place and not to the 
wrong one after he is dead, were not changed at 
all. In their preaching of the gospel, which 
was thoroughly zealous and sincere, the clergy 
of that time made use of the common religious 
convictions of their age. People who came 
into the various Protestant bodies, German, 
Swiss, French, Netherland or English, came in 
under the same appeals, for the same reasons, 
and cherishing the same hopes that the Re- 
formers themselves had when they had come 
into the Roman churches in the days of their 
youth. 

The study that we make of the Reformation 
period in its relation to modern problems falls 
naturally into three parts. The first is the 
Reformation idea of the relation between the 
individual believer and the church. This dif- 
fered in no essential respect from the medieval 
Roman view, though it does differ quite materi- 


146 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


ally from the modern view. The second is the 
change often referred to as the shift from an 
infallible church to an infallible Bible. This 
is a misleading statement, since both these 
ideas of infallibility are subsequent develop- 
ments. The real change that was made was 
from the Roman idea of the church having an 
authority that was separate from, and in addi- 
tion to, the authority of Scripture, to the 
Protestant idea of the church having only the 
authority to interpret Scripture. The third 
and last point we shall consider is the change 
that came—a real change this time—from the 
idea of a single, universal church, superior to 
all civil and political ties that bind men to- 
gether, to the earlier idea that Rome had out- 
grown centuries before, of the church in close 
relationship to a single government. 

The relation between the believer and the 
church is really the most important problem 
that the Reformers had before them, though it 
secured only the smallest part of their atten- 
tion. For more than a thousand years Rome 
had been teaching that while salvation is a 
matter of divine mercy, and in the final analysis 


THE CHURCH DIVIDED 147 


of the case is secured through the sacrifice of 
Christ, the terms and conditions of bestowing 
that mercy are very rigidly laid down. They 
depend upon a certain mystic immunity or 
privilege that has been committed to the 
church. The authority to exercise this priv- 
ilege, so the medieval theologians held, came 
originally through the Apostle Peter, to whom 
had been given the ‘‘power of the keys,’’ the 
right to bind or to loose in the name of Christ. 
By the fortunate chance that Peter had become 
the first Bishop of Rome, this authority had re- 
mained, and would remain for all time, the 
exclusive possession of the Roman See. The 
Reformers disposed of this claim in various 
ways. The arguments most used ran along 
two lines. They denied that the power to bind 
and to loose was the exclusive possession of 
Peter but asserted that it belonged to the whole 
apostolic body, of which he was the spokesman. 
Some of the bolder Protestants went so far as 
to claim that this power belonged to the whole 
church, and not exclusively to the Apostles. 
The other line of argument was purely nega- 
tive. There is no actual proof, certainly none 


148 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


that was satisfactory to the Reformers, that 
Peter was the first Bishop of Rome. And 
whether he was or not, all the authority that 
he had was strictly personal and died with 
him. 

This whole discussion of authority was a 
plain, though entirely unintentional, evasion of 
the main issue. The whole problem centers in 
the question what salvation really is. The 
idea of it that was held in those days, by Catho- 
lic and Protestant alike, and is still very gen- 
erally held all over Christendom, regards salva- 
tion as nothing more than the desperate rescue, 
by any hook or crook whatever, from the pains 
and penalties of sin in a future life. Give the 
sixteenth-century Christian a reasonable as- 
surance of that, and he asked for nothing else. 
What he was going to be, in that future life, 
never troubled him at all beside the supreme 
question where he was going to be. All 
Kurope had been trained for centuries into a 
morbid fear of future punishment, heightened 
in its appeal to the imagination by every kind 
of crude scriptural and traditional imagery. 
The awakening of this fear was the sole de- 


THE CHURCH DIVIDED 149 


pendence of such evangelism as was under- 
taken, and formed almost the whole of the 
religious training of the young. Endless tor- 
ture, which to them meant literal fire and brim- 
stone, was the fate in store for the unshriven 
man. His only hope was to do what the church 
told him to do and to believe what the church 
told him to believe. Then the church would 
exercise the right given to it long ago, not only 
‘pronouncing the penitent absolved from eternal 
woes, but shortening also his time of temporary 
discipline in Purgatory. 

Leaving out of this all reference to Purga- 
tory, the Reformers held exactly the same view 
of salvation, as the rescue by a narrow margin 
from perdition, and practically the same view 
of the authority committed to the church. 
They talked a great deal about regeneration, 
sanctification, growth in grace, spiritual re- 
birth, and other theological catch-words, but 
when it came to preaching the gospel they were 
practical men, seeking results. Doctrines that 
have been implicitly believed for a thousand 
years have usually reached the point where the 
thousand years itself is the only argument that 


150 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


is needed to keep them going. They were 
diligent readers of Scripture and knew that the 
teachings of Jesus were not of such character 
as to promote selfishness, even in seeking salva- 
tion. Whatever interpretation might be given 
to his words when separated into single sen- 
tences, there could be no question that his 
general teaching did not encourage his hearers 
to hope for an evasion of the consequences of 
their own wrong-doing by taking advantage of 
theological casuistry. No religious teacher in 
the world ever spoke more plainly of the pen- 
alties of sin, both in this life and in the next. 
But he was constantly trying to bring sinful 
men into right relations with God. The puri- 
fication of the stream at its source, as set forth 
in his night conference with Nicodemus, was the 
hope that he held out to the world. He taught 
people a kind of doctrine that in many quarters 
to-day would be called perilously liberal. It 
was not stated categorically or theologically. 
But the general idea of future salvation that 
appears all through the Master’s teachings was 
to encourage his hearers to believe that if their 


THE CHURCH DIVIDED 151 


hearts were right with God they could commit 
their future entirely to him, without insisting 
that he tell them beforehand just what was to 
be done to this or that kind of sinner, penitent 
or impenitent, in the endless existence beyond 
the grave. 

The Reformers had not reached our modern 
ideas of the teachings of Christ as the culmina- 
tion and practical replacement of the immature 
and incomplete religious concepts of former 
generations. They thought of the religion in 
the Bible as exactly the same thing from Gen- 
esis right through to Revelation. We think 
of it as a record of developing conceptions 
of God and of human duty. When Jesus said 
anything on these subjects, we think of his 
words as the final stage of thought. They take 
the place of what was imperfectly and incom- 
pletely, though not always mistakenly, said by 
the men of old time on those same subjects. 
But the Reformers looked upon the words of 
Jesus as triumphantly proving that everything 
previously said on the same subjects in the Old 
Testament was absolutely complete and in- 


152 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


fallible truth. They knew of only one kind of 
inspired knowledge, and it was perfect and 
complete at every stage. 

Of course the Reformers, and the Puritans 
after them, thought of the Old Testament rev- 
elation as an incomplete religion, in the sense 
that people then were waiting for the promised 
Messiah. But the people in the Old Testament 
were looking for Messiah very much as all 
types of adventism for the past dozen centuries 
have been looking for his second coming, not to 
teach anything new but merely to fulfil in ab- 
solute literalness what had been taught before. 
That was the mistake that the Jews made in 
the time of Christ. He did not fulfil the con- 
ditions. He taught so many things that were 
entirely new and unheard of that they rejected 
him as the expected Messiah and crucified him. 
~ No one who reads Reformation and Puritan 
theology with any kind of discrimination can 
question that its position on this belief in Old 
Testament religion, as a perfect faith waiting 
only for Messiah to come, was practically that 
of the first-century Jews. Of course the Re- 
formers did not question the authority of 


THE CHURCH DIVIDED 153 


Christ. But more people than Pontius Pilate 
have looked upon his statement that his king- 
dom is not of this world, and is not to be ad- 
vanced by the policies of this world, as a beau- 
tiful but impractical idealism. The Reformers 
and the Puritans used the words of Christ 
freely for the comforting of saints. But when 
it came to rousing sinners, they usually went 
elsewhere for their texts. What they wanted 
was thrill, and they found it in the Pentateuch 
and the Prophets. They used the Old Testa- 
ment not as we do, as a rich storehouse of 
fundamental religious concepts applied to hu- 
man lives in practical ways, but as a rigid and 
bloody scheme of human salvation by sacrifice, 
perfect and perpetually obligatory because 
given by divine inspiration. 

In a word, the leaders in the Reformation, 
both in the time of Luther and later, and the 
great divines of the Puritan movement after- 
ward, taught and practised a kind of religion, 
in all earnestness and sincerity, that can 
scarcely be distinguished from the kind that 
had been taught and practised before Christ 
came into the world. It was ‘‘scriptural’’ be- 


154 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


yond all question, for every part of it is in 
Scripture with lurid plainness. It was an ex- 
cellent and successful religion of the pre- 
Christian type, but it was not Christian. 
Though they used the name of Christ and gave 
him all reverence and worship as the bringer 
of an effective atonement, there was so little 
of his actual teaching in their religion that we 
can distinguish it only with considerable diffi- 
culty from the religion of the Scribes and 
Pharisees. It encouraged people to believe 
that they were saved, and even to believe that 
they were rather exceptional saints, while their 
hearts were very far indeed from what God 
requires. And it filled their churches with a 
very pious, very selfish, and very self-satisfied 
people, who deserve our pity rather than our 
censure for the evident sincerity of their con- 
fidence that their spiritual condition was all 
that such a God as they believed in could ever 
ask for. 

This, in its naked ugliness, is the actual out- 
working of certain ideas of religion that in our 
modern days, just as in any other age, produce 
the same result. It is the measuring of faith 


THE CHURCH DIVIDED 155 


by its zeal for orthodoxy rather than by the 
Christlikeness of its effect. Such ideas of re- 
ligion may be, and indeed from our own ob- 
servation we should say they usually are, the 
result of earnest and most serious concern for 
the good of human souls. But beyond any pos- 
sible question, the witchcraft delusion of our 
early New England forefathers originated in 
the same ignorant and zealous concern for the 
spiritual good of their neighbors and friends. 
‘There is no obligation to sustain or to apologize 
for bigotry because the ghosts that it raises 
are very real to itself. 

The whole problem of certain pronounced 
types of hard and cruel religion that have been 
handed down to us from Reformation and post- 
Reformation times, bolstered up by scriptural 
authority, comes down in the final analysis to 
this simple question: When Christ came into 
the world, did he really have anything new to 
teach, or must we regard his teaching as the 
mere echo and perfect confirmation of every 
previous teaching that had been given by a com- 
plete, inerrant, and final revelation from God? 
It does not help the case at all to say that the 


156 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


things taught in the Old Testament were per- 
fect and inerrant so far as they went, but that 
they needed the atonement, to be furnished by 
the expected Messiah, in order to make them 
complete. For in that case, it is impossible 
to understand why the Messiah, when he did 
come, did not provide the atonement at once, 
and so fulfil and complete these religious con- 
ceptions of the previous two thousand years. 
Why was he continually teaching a religion of 
his own, so distinctly his own that even his 
disciples could not recognize it as what they 
had been accustomed to? Why did he insist 
upon giving to the world new ideas of God 
that no man had ever thought of before, if the 
ideas of God that they already had were per- 
fect and faultless? Why give another religion 
to the world, which already has an Old Testa- 
ment full of them, all divine, all inerrant, all 
needing nothing but the single item of a ful- 
filled prophecy of Messiah to make them 
complete? 

We have gone into this subject in some de- 
tail in order to make clear the Reformers’ 
doctrine of the relation of the believer to the 


THH CHURCH DIVIDED 157 


church. We may consider first the idea that 
the New Testament Christians held on this 
subject. In the second chapter of the Book of 
the Acts, forty-seventh verse, descriptive of 
the first Christian church, it is said that the 
Lord was adding together day by day those 
who were being saved. ‘T'oo much of doctrinal 
significance should not be attached to a state- 
ment of a purely narrative character, but this 
sentence can hardly mean less than that these 
people, having consciously come into a personal 
relationship to Christ, thought of themselves 
as also in a definite and vitally organized rela- 
tionship with all other believers. It was the 
Lord that added them together, rather than the 
church that reached out and took them in. 
Actual and visible relationship to all others 
who were seeking to serve Christ was a part of 
their own relationship to him, and could not 
be repudiated without at the same time repudi- 
ating Christ himself. One was their Master, 
even Christ, and all they were brethren. 
Therefore they must live as Christians should 
live, not only with a few brethren whom they 
liked, but with all brethren. 


158 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


Whatever interpretation we may give to 
these words, they are a long way indeed from 
the medieval idea of running into the church 
in order to be saved; as one ran, for instance, 
into an ancient city of refuge to escape the 
avenger of blood. The Reformers inherited 
directly from Rome their idea of salvation as 
a covenant or bargain. It fits in exactly with 
the Roman idea of the church as the exclusive 
possessor of special privileges, secured some- 
what fortuitously through the Apostle Peter. 
The Reformers multiplied Peter by eleven, and 
got the same answer. God had made certain 
promises in days of old, chiefly through the 
prophets. Their idea was that Christ came to 
fulfil those promises, but not to change the 
conditions. He was simply the victim, pro- 
vided for the sacrifice. Salvation is to be se- 
cured by holding God to his word, pleading his 
promises as though he is trying to break away 
from them, tying him up, hand and foot, by 
every chance word that he has let slip from 
Genesis to Revelation, and weaving them all 
into a grand total that no self-respecting Deity 
can possibly repudiate on the Judgment Day. 


THE CHURCH DIVIDED 159 


It is a part of the old, hard, legalized idea of 
religion that we have inherited from a coarse 
and cruel past that is not many years away. It 
is an idea that is in the Scriptures, to be sure, 
for the Scriptures also had their coarse and 
cruel past, in the time of the Judges, for in- 
stance, and their present in the time of Christ. 
The Children of Israel did have cities of refuge. 
But they abandoned them as soon as they could 
provide better police regulations. There are 
types of modern evangelism that still live in 
the Book of Joshua, and cannot get away from 
the idea of salvation by sanctuary. ‘Thousands 
of people have listened to the preaching of the 
gospel all their lives without being able to dis- 
tinguish between salvation by being something 
and salvation by getting somewhere. They 
still make the Church of Christ a city of refuge, 
a conception that Israel itself had abandoned a 
dozen centuries before Christ came. 

There is an ark in ancient tradition, floating 
above a waste of water and landing safe at 
last. Very remotely it may suggest, in a fig- 
urative way, the escape of the righteous from 
the doom of the wicked. It was a favorite 


160 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


theme of searching evangelism in the days 
when most of our creeds were formulated. 
The world is going to destruction, and the 
church has been provided for those who have 
foresight and self-interest enough to come in 
out of the storm. Their salvation is not a 
matter of any change in themselves or vital re- 
lationship with the divine or any other Chris- 
tian teaching, but solely the believing of some- 
thing so unusual that the world refuses to be- 
lieve it; though it must be confessed it is a 
little difficult for our modern minds to per- 
ceive what difference it would have made to 
the wicked, no matter what they did or what 
they believed, for there was no room for them 
in the ark, it was not built for them, and it was 
God’s purpose to destroy the wicked anyway. 
We may grant the earnestness with which 
warnings of impending destruction were held 
out to those who needed them, in preaching the 
ark-idea of the church, but what a terrible con- 
ception of God the original story itself pre- 
sents, to say nothing of the use that has been 
made of it! And what an utterly grotesque 
picture it makes to attach the idea of the 


THE CHURCH DIVIDED 161 


church to this ancient story in any homiletical 
way whatsoever! 

Over against this contract idea of church 
membership, we may consider the radical dif- 
ference in atmosphere when we come to the 
teachings of Christ. The wonderful parables 
that he used, not claiming any historical 
truth at the basis of them though there may 
have been, all run along the same line as his 
positive teachings of dogma. We may take a 
vivid story, from the summit of revelation and 
not from its remote beginnings, that bears with 
precision upon this very subject of relation- 
ship between believers, which is exactly the 
same, in the Christian teaching, as the rela- 
tion of the believer to the church. An elder 
son has a younger brother, whom he did not 
ask for and is in no sense responsible for. 
He is just his brother, by accident of birth, and 
neither of them can help or avoid the relation- 
ship. Having the same parents, they must be 
brothers, a fixed and permanent condition. 
It is a very human situation in this prosperous 
and joyless household. There is virtue with- 
out affection, service without joy, strict dis- 


162 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


charge of all duties except the one that is more 
obligatory than all others, a life of rigid up- 
rightness, producing the hard and unlovely 
kind of character that we all are unfortunately 
familiar with. The younger son also has his 
faults, and they are serious. He is fickle, 
shallow-minded, self-indulgent, conceited, al- 
most everything that is disagreeable. Our 
Lord is not seeking an abnormally beautiful 
setting for his narrative. He knows what is in 
man. He is under no illusion as to what his 
churches are going to be. He came to save a 
world that needs saving. , He is picturing be- 
fore us a real household. 

The father occupies about the same position 
in his own house that God holds in most of his 
churches. Years ago he could keep the peace 
by authority but the sons are grown now, and 
authority only widens the breach that lack of 
principle and lack of mutual consideration has 
made. The younger son makes a foolish re- 
quest that is almost a demand. The father 
certainly must have known what a risk it was 
to send a young man like that, with money in 
his purse, away from home. But the case is 


THE CHURCH DIVIDED 163 


hopeless anyway. As the event proved, fa- 
therly love after all did make a wiser choice 
than all the wisdom in the world could have 
done. But the father has a fine sense of justice. 
He gives to the elder son his portion also, the 
double portion, though he has not asked for it. 
And he retains for himself his actual living 
and the limited authority about the house that 
the law provided. 

The young man gathers all together, loses his 
head completely in his newly found freedom, 
goes into the far country, and returns im- 
poverished and disgraced. But he is not the 
same young man who went away. He has put 
away his pride. He has lost his quarrelsome 
disposition. He can be lived with now, in some 
kind of comfort. He has come to himself. 
The joy of his return is marred by one incident 
which is the chief part of the story, though 
it is often put into a secondary place. 

A double obligation rested upon the elder son 
to make his brother welcome. There is first 
the tie of relationship, which is a changeless 
condition, not dependent upon circumstances 
nor even upon character. Certainly there was 


164 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


an. obligation resting upon this young man, be- 
cause of his relationship, at least to inquire 
into the circumstances of his brother’s return, 
even if it were no more than the effort to learn 
the cause of such a remarkable outburst of 
enthusiasm in a household like theirs. 

Then, in addition to this fact of natural rela- 
tionship, there is the further obligation that 
every shekel this elder brother owned in the 
world he owed to his younger brother, whose 
impatience had secured for him the division of 
the estate before such a division was due. He 
had lost nothing, for all that the prodigal had 
spent was his own. He had gained an estate, 
and he had gained a brother. The younger man 
had come to himself—the greatest fact in the 
parable. This change alone was worth to the 
family infinitely more than all the money that 
it had cost. If this had been anything but a 
Christian story we might naturally think of 
the inevitable consequences of a sinful life, even 
after contrition and reform. It is the pe- 
euliarity of the religion of which this story is 
a part, however, that it teaches always and 
everywhere the possibility of a re-created life, 


THE CHURCH DIVIDED 165 


an actual birth from above into a newness that 
carries no stain from the old, when the old is 
really put away, and furnishes an infinite 
vitality that puts aside the laws of nature and 
their penalties. This is miracle, real miracle. 
Into this wonderful story there has come the 
mystery of a changed heart. The whole signif- 
icance of the parable turns upon this fact. The 
father was not using a figure of speech so much 
as setting forth a truth like the one told to 
Nicodemus when he said, ‘‘This, thy brother, 
was dead and is alive again.’’ For the first 
time in his life, at least since they were children 
together, this young man has a real brother. 
There now is the possibility of a home life that 
will make his flocks and herds and lands and 
bond-servants seem to be nothing at all by com- 
parison. The younger brother by asking for 
his portion of goods had made the elder brother 
rich, but the swine-field in the far country had 
made him incaleulably richer, if he only knew it. 
When a man comes to himself—is genuinely 
converted—the whole world is made so rich 
that it overflows in all directions, and every 
other man can have a share. 


166 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


We read of a certain rich young man in 
Perea who had a chance for investment far be- 
yond anything that has ever been furnished be- 
fore or since, and he threw it away. It is 
a rather striking parallel here, just outside the 
circle of light and music and feasting. The 
father, coming out to entreat his son to be rich, 
to forsake what is worthless for what is of in- 
finite value, to keep all that he has that is 
worth keeping and to get everything else, is a 
picture of the tragedy of the modern church. 
We don’t know the value of brotherhood. We 
refuse to be entreated. We don’t like music 
and dancing for such cause. We would rather 
stay out in the dark, nursing our own aggrieved 
and outraged theology. 

By every system of measurement this is ae 
greatest parable of human nature that ever was 
spoken. To say nothing of his marvelous 
spiritual insight, our Lord had the natural 
gift of story-telling in a remarkable degree. 
His characters are always true to themselves. 
This elder brother is plainly a dull fellow at 
the best, and he remains utterly stupid to the 
last, but such imagination as he has runs along 


THE CHURCH DIVIDED 167 


one narrow and very persistent line. He also 
has longed all his life for riotous living, of an 
inexpensive kind and with the minimum of 
risk, but riotous nevertheless, according to his 
standard. It is the only joyous life he is able 
to think of. Even now, rich as he is, with flocks 
and herds of his own and with no need to ask 
any one for a kid, he cannot get over the fact 
that for a long time he never had been given the 
means of merrymaking with his friends. He 
begrudges the one fatted calf that has been 
requisitioned to celebrate the family joy. He 
is the victim of the very saddest misfortune 
that can overtake a man in the world, in that 
he is unable to forget a grievance after it is 
entirely past. Riches do not make people gen- 
erous. Spiritual privileges do not make them 
Christlike. And thanking God that we have 
not devoured our living with harlots, if this 
young man really did so, does not change the 
condition that, so long as that kind of life is 
our highest idea of pleasure, by our Lord’s in- 
terpretation of the commandments we ourselves 
have to all intents and purposes committed the 
very same sin. 


168 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


All the religious teachers, reformers and 
geniuses in the world could not put the lancet 
into the sore spot of modern Christianity with 
more disconcerting accuracy than is done by 
this wonderful parable, nineteen centuries old. 
Lack of brotherly kindness is the one and only 
trouble of the church. God furnishes every- 
thing else, but we must furnish that. If we 
were brethren in fact as we are in name, we 
could throw every other doctrine that we have 
to the winds and still be theologically rich, or 
we could invent new and startling doctrines 
every hour and never be troubled by heresy. 
And the most wonderful thing of all about 
brotherly kindness is that it never costs any- 
thing, no matter what sacrifices it may entail 
for the time being, for the gain is always more 
than the price that is paid. 

The whole New Testament idea of the church 
is that of a family, and never of a covenant or 
bargain or escape or refuge. Those partial 
conceptions came up in olden time, and through 
them the Hebrew people developed their ideas 
of God’s mercy up to a point where Jesus could 
take them and use them as a foundation for a 


THE CHURCH DIVIDED 169 


nobler conception of God and of man. When 
Israel was a child he thought as a child. 
When the fulness of time had come, the 
spiritual Israel put away childish things. We 
cannot gather a few congenial Christians to- 
gether whose type of religious prejudice is 
most like our own, and form ourselves into a 
church. Of course we can name the club that 
is thus formed a church, but it isn’t one. 
Churches are born, not made. We cannot even 
select the church that we propose to honor with 
our membership. God does the selecting, by 
causing sons and daughters to be born into his 
kingdom. Then the question comes home to us 
whether we will permit the Lord to join us with 
them, in the good old way of the second chap- 
ter in the Acts, or will do our own joining, 
with congenial Christians exclusively, in the 
way of the past four centuries. And when a 
grievance arises we are not privileged to with- 
draw in dudgeon and join a rival church down 
street. That is not building up the kingdom 
of God. It is changing religious boarding- 
houses. People who do that have no church 
home, and never will have. 


170 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


Of course we may find ourselves in a so- 
called religious fellowship that is no church at 
all, and this is all too often the unfortunate 
condition that we have inherited from the past. 
Which brings us to the second of the three 
features of the Reformation problems under 
consideration, the change that was made from 
the Roman to the Protestant idea of authority. 
Speaking in the most general terms, Rome held 
that authority comes from two sources, the 
Scriptures and the church. The Protestants 
held that authority comes from Scripture alone. 
Practically the difference ‘between them is this: 
Rome held the view that no Scripture is au- 
thoritative for the believer until it has been 
interpreted for him by the church. The 
Protestants held the view that the Scripture 
itself is the only authority, and that the be- 
liever must do his own interpreting. But he 
must be very careful to interpret the inspired 
Word exactly as his own sect of Protestantism 
demands. It must be confesed that to the aver- 
age intelligence this distinction hardly seems 
vital enough to go to war over, but no historian 
can question the large place it has occupied and 


THE CHURCH DIVIDED 171 


the evil results it has produced in the past four 
centuries. 

It is one thing to go to the Bible with un- 
biased mind and to make up a scheme of the- 
ology entirely from Scripture. Possibly some 
people did this eighteen centuries ago. Cer- 
tainly nobody did it four centuries ago. The 
theologies of the Reformation period and lafer 
came chiefly through tradition. The Protes- 
tants did make changes in their creeds, but 
beyond rejecting certain Roman dogmas the 
changes were not very great. They used the 
Bible diligently and reverently, but they made 
of it mainly a storehouse of proof-texts for 
things that they already believed. One of the 
joys that some of us look forward to in a 
future life is the fact that we shall have the 
chance of hearing what St. Paul has to say on 
the use that has been made of some of his texts. 

It is interesting and rather amusing to read 
Luther’s vigorous denunciations of ‘‘scho- 
lasticism,’’ by which term he means worldly 
philosophy as distinguished from Scripture. 
For Luther’s theology is scholastic, through 
and through, with many pronounced advances, 


172 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


of course, and a fair amount of independent 
thinking. John Calvin was the first of the 
greater Reformers to go back of the time of 
the medieval Schoolmen for his doctrinal views. 
He obtained most of his system from Augustine, 
in the fourth and fifth centuries, as he claimed 
to do. But inasmuch as the Schoolmen them- 
selves obtained their theologies mainly from 
Augustine, the difference is not very great 
after all. In the use of proof-texts to support 
his elaborate and logical dogmas, Calvin stands 
supreme among other geniuses in that line. 
What he cannot prove from Scripture is hardly 
worth considering. 

When it came to devising systems of church 
organization and government, however, the Re- 
formers exhibited more originality and much 
less divergence of opinion. It was possible 
for them to come nearer together on this 
subject than in matters of abstract theology. 
Protestant sects to-day are numbered by the 
hundreds, but systems of church government 
fall into three classes only, the Episcopal, the 
Presbyterian, and the Congregational or In- 


THE CHURCH DIVIDED 173 


dependent. Without entering into detail, we 
may state the chief differences among them as 
follows: 

In the Episcopal system, which is nearest like 
the papal both in form and in history, the 
rule is vested principally in the episcopus or 
bishop, and the clergy are divided into orders, 
each with its definite function and authority. 
There can be no question that the churches of 
the second century and later were organized 
under bishops, a fact usually referred to by 
the name ‘‘Historic Hpiscopate.’’ In this sys- 
tem bishops are regarded as the official suc- 
cessors of the Apostles, clothed with their 
original authority over the churches. 

In the Presbyterian system the chief author- 
ity is in the presbyters, or elders, and the clergy 
are not graded into orders. Presbyterian 
theologians usually hold that the New Testa- 
ment offices of bishop and elder were essentially 
the same, and that the Apostles had no official 
successors. Local Presbyterian churches are 
grouped into geographic units, usually called 
presbyteries, and these into larger units called 


174 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


synods and assemblies. They have a certain 
well-defined authority over the individual 
churches and clergy. 

In the Congregational system the authority is 
in the local congregation, which is organized 
and administered much like the local Presby- 
terian church, though more flexible and demo- 
cratic. Groupings of local churches in larger 
or smaller numbers are of an advisory char- 
acter. General supervision both in doctrinal 
and temporal matters is carried on by extend- 
ing or withholding fellowship and not by 
definite authority. Variations of these three 
systems exist in Methodist and other Protestant 
bodies. 

There has been about as much controversy 
over systems of church government as there 
has been in questions of religious belief. 
About as many wars have been fought to prove 
that Episcopacy or Presbyterianism or Inde- 
pendency is the one and only New Testament 
form as to prove anything else, and they have 
proved it fully as well. To go over the history 
of church governments would be merely to re- 
peat the wearisome details of conceited scholar- 


THE CHURCH DIVIDED 175 


ship, stubborn conviction and ignorant vitu- 
peration, practically the same as we find in the 
history of dissension over abstract theological 
doctrines. 

We turn briefly to the last of the three fea- 
tures of religious thought in the Reformation 
period that bear upon modern problems, the 
division into sects. These, however, were 
not like our modern denominations but were 
racial and national bodies, each one organ- 
ically connected with the civil government of 
the country in which it was situated. A na- 
tional church, supported by general taxation 
and administered by secular authority, is not a 
great advance over the old pagan idea of a na- 
tional god. Of course if the Reformers had 
really obtained their religious ideas from the 
New Testament alone, as they are nowadays 
supposed to have done, this form of organiza- 
tion could not have appeared. If there is any 
one subject on earth that is not in the New 
Testament, or even a hint of it in any possible 
form, that subject is a state church. But we 
should remember that the conditions were quite 
different from those of the first Christian cen- 


176 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


tury. The New Testament Christians lived in 
a pagan civilization that was hostile in a sense, 
but not nearly so hostile as the papal environ- 
ment of the Reformers. Practically the Apos- 
tles carried on their work in the same condi- 
tion that the Jews had lived under for centuries. 
They had no assurance of protection in their 
worship, and opposition was liable to develop 
at any time, but for the most part they were 
left alone, in practical independence. 

With the early Protestants the situation was 
entirely different. The papal church had no 
intention of permitting freedom of worship, 
and behind it stood the whole armed force of 
Hurope. When the Emperor summoned Lu- 
ther to meet the Diet at Worms he was act- 
ing as the puppet of Rome. One of the very 
first necessities confronting the Reformers was 
to gain enough politically influential friends 
to protect them against the papal power. 
This necessity exposed them to all the evils of 
allying religion with secular politics, but there 
was no help for it at the time. We are very 
unjust to the Protestant leaders in different 
localities if we criticize them for proceeding 


THE CHURCH DIVIDED 177 


along the only way that seemed to be open. 
Their separation from one another at the be- 
ginning was not from any jealousy or sus- 
picion or lack of brotherly interest, but was the 
outgrowth of a natural effort on the part of 
each group for self-protection. Germans, 
Swiss, French, and Netherlanders turned to 
their own governments rather than to other 
Protestants. The general revolt against Rome 
in its earlier stages was too weak and uncertain 
to count upon when opposed by the mighty 
power of the papacy. 

Within a few years, however, the Protestant 
movement had become so firmly established in 
several of the stronger nations that a practical 
union of Protestantism might have been 
formed, if they had gone about the task in the 
right way. Advances were made in this di- 
rection, but in a very timid and hesitating 
manner. It would not be easy to tell just 
where the blame lies for not completing a 
work so desirable, but a careful study of this 
perplexing subject would indicate that the jeal- 
ousies and suspicions which prevented a practi- 
eal union of Protestant forces were rather 


178 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


among states and peoples than among churches. 
Protestantism itself was a tentative movement. 
In its four centuries of existence it never has 
exhibited the marks of a constructive policy. 
It is not characterized by accomplishment but 
by continuous preparation; not doing some- 
thing so much as getting ready to do something. 
This being the case, it has not mattered a great 
deal, after all, just what shifting and tem- 
porary forms the different Protestant bodies 
have assumed. The serious consideration just 
now is that the state of ignorance and undevel- 
opment, which enabled a ‘divided Potestantism 
to do its work after a fashion and with some 
success for so many years, has passed out of 
existence. The present century needs a reli- 
gion as far in advance of divided Protestantism 
as the sixteenth century needed one in advance 
of medieval Romanism. 

Men of science whose opinions we are bound 
to respect, however much we may regret that 
the facts of history they discover could not 
have been a little more flattering, tell us that 
at a certain remote period our ancestors were 
obliged to leave the earth, where they had been 


THE CHURCH DIVIDED 179 


dwelling, and for a time to live in the trees. 
Some geological or climatic change had greatly 
multiplied the evil beasts and reptiles, and man 
was unable to combat them successfully. 
Evidences of this period, in embryology and 
anatomy, still remain, so clear that they are 
hardly subjects for questioning. The inter- 
esting part of the record seems to be that it 
was not the dying out of the beasts and reptiles 
‘but the growing ability of mankind, forced 
upon them because of their limited quarters in 
the tree-tops, to use hands and weapons and 
to work together, that gave to primitive man 
the kind of possession and control over the 
earth that modern man now has. Which 
things, as St. Paul would say, are an allegory. 
Evil conditions forced our good Protestant 
forefathers into the theological tree-tops. 
We have had to live and think and worship in 
these limited quarters where we were born, but 
we are outgrowing them. We are learning 
how to forge our spiritual weapons and to work 
together in harmony, so as to take possession of 
the world and to make the kingdoms of it the 
kingdoms of our Lord and of this Christ. 


180 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


The Reformation developed rapidly but it 
soon reached its full stature. Where it 
stopped nearly four centuries ago it is still 
standing. The boundary lines in Europe be- 
tween Catholic and Protestant have scarcely 
shifted a mile since the death of Luther. Later 
Protestantism spent its force in still further 
subdividing and in battling over opinions. We 
regard the whole movement as preparatory, and 
give it all praise for what it has done. It has 
opened the Scriptures for us so widely that we 
ean see the failings of Protestantism itself 
with painful distinctness. It has cultivated a 
spirit of religious liberty that now revolts 
against bigotry as it once revolted against pre- 
lacy. The Reformers made their mistakes. 
We also will make ours. But we can at least 
avoid the very greatest of all blunders, trying in 
present conditions to remain where we are. 
The old movement is dead. It has had its day, 
and a noble day it was. Conditions have 
changed, certainly in this respect at least, that 
human minds to-day cannot be forced into the 
ways of thinking that satisfied our forefathers, 
nor can we tolerate many things in our religion 


THE CHURCH DIVIDED 181 


that did not hurt or shock the best people in the 
world only a few years ago. We firmly believe 
that if we of the present age are as willing to 
be led as the Reformers were, into a future that 
surly is no more hazardous and uncertain than 
theirs was and has infinitely greater promise, 
we also can count upon the same divine assist- 
ance. And if it shall please God to lay this 
duty upon our generation, we hope and pray 
that we may be as willing to undertake and as 
courageous to discharge our obligation as they 
were to take up and to go through with theirs. 


, rif 


by i " ity Rta , 





THE CHURCH EXPECTANT 


In these days that are passing over us, even fools are 
arrested to ask the meaning of them. 
THOMAS CARLYLE. 


The Christian is not merely a man who does certain 
things. He is a man who does all things from a certain 
motive and in a certain spirit. 

ANDREW GILLIES. 


Therefore I beg of you all, in the name of God and of 
our neglected youth, not to think of this subject lightly. 
For the right instruction of youth is a matter in which 
Christ and all the world are concerned. 

Martin LUTHER. 


The Message of the age to a divided church is this: The 
day of rival denominations is past. Unity must come, un- 
less the chureh is to die. The rampant denominationalist 
is as far behind the times as is the extreme individualist in 
society or the anarchist in government. 

Tertius VAN DYKE. 


There is no greater delusion than to suppose that the 
modern man is repelled from religious observances by what 
he is required to believe. Experience compels me to affirm 
that it is not the difficulty of squaring Christianity with 
modern science that is in question, but rather the difficulty 
of squaring its ethical precepts with the requirements of 
industrial and commercial practice. 

R. J. CAMPBELL. 


We are challenged by this war to a renovation of our 
popular Christianity, to a deep and unrelenting detesta- 
tion of the little bigotries and obscurantisms that so curse 
our churches, to a full and intelligent expression of vital 
fellowship with God. Unless we ean answer that challenge, 
there is little use of our trying to answer any other. We 
must have a great religion to meet a great need. The sad- 
dest aspect of Christian history is the misrepresentation of 
Christ and the spoiling of his influence, not by irreligious 
men but by the official exponents of religion. 

Harry Emerson Fospicx. 


i 
Aa 


CHAPTER IV 
THE CHURCH EXPECTANT 


N previous chapters we have gone over 

certain events in ecclesiastical history that 
bear most directly upon the problems now con- 
fronting the Christian church. Our object has 
been to present each incident in its true his- 
toric perspective, so far as the information that 
we now have makes this possible. We have 
traced out the principal traditions upon which 
modern Christianity is built, not in a fault- 
finding spirit nor in the effort to sustain or to 
apologize for any condition that now exists. 
We hold no brief for advancing any special 
brand of Christianity. We are simply try- 
ing to distinguish the real historic church from 
the imaginary kind that many good people still 
think they have. We present in this chapter, 
with equal brevity, a few of these modern prob- 


lems. For the sake of additional clearness we 
185 


186 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


find it necessary to go over again, on parallel 
lines, some of the subjects we have already 
considered. 

The Christian church is nearly two thousand 
years old. It has outlived three distinct civili- 
zations, the ancient, the imperial, and the 
feudal. It has a composite character. It is 
based upon certain historic facts that are firmly 
established, and upon certain moral and re- 
ligious principles that cannot be disputed. 
They never have been changed, and never will 
be changed so long as the world endures. 
Stated as some of these principles are, in the 
Sermon on the Mount, for example, they may 
be perplexing to us, but we never question 
that they are true. We can imagine conditions 
where it might be impolitic and apparently 
useless to turn the second cheek to the smiter, 
to give the cloak to one who by litigation has 
taken our coat, to go voluntarily a second 
mile with him who by force has compelled 
us to go one mile only. But, recognizing of 
course that these are figures of speech to 
set forth a certain kindly spirit in which we 
should deal with unjust men, nobody can ques- 


THE CHURCH EXPECTANT = 187 


tion that such a spirit is right. Nor can any 
one question that real peace and human hap- 
piness are never going to come to this world 
of ours in any other way. Any religion can 
tell us how to deal with people who want to 
deal rightly. Only Christ has ever told us how 
to deal with those who have not dealt rightly, 
and have not wanted to deal rightly, with us. 
His teachings search out the depths of human 
experience. Upon them, and upon them only, 
can a perfect condition of mankind ever be 
built. 

But when it comes to the application of these 
principles in our own lives, we run into the 
problems that have given to historic Christian- 
ity its composite character. Duty almost never 
presents itself to us in one clear and unmis- 
takable attitude. It is opposed by other duties 
quite as often as it is opposed by positive 
evils. We recognize the claim that the widows 
and the orphans have upon us. But when the 
opportunity comes to go after the man or the 
institution or the condition of society that made 
them widows and orphans, the greater duty 
may make it obligatory to neglect the smaller. 


188 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


In many things indeed the historic church has 
utterly failed. On many occasions it has fallen 
so far short of its opportunities as to make its 
sacred mission a mockery. It has been domi- 
nated by worldly policies and selfish ambitions. 
It has had to be brought back to its duties again 
and again by spasmodic reforms. In the pass- 
ing years it has accumulated a great many 
things that are not even remotely Christian in 
their origin, though they are accepted and be- 
lieved and contended for to-day by a consider- 
able part of Christendom. And it has lost 
many things that the early Christians fully be- 
lieved to be essential parts of their religion. 
Some of these lost doctrines were simply 
misunderstandings that ran their course, ex- 
pectations that failed to materialize. The 
most conspicuous example is the transfer to 
Christianity of the Hebrew misconception of 
the coming of Messiah in power and glory to 
establish a kingdom by force. The early 
Christians could not make this expectation fit 
the actual coming of Jesus, with his teaching of 
a spiritual kingdom and his utter repudiation 
of the conquest of the world by external author- 


THE CHURCH EXPECTANT 189 


ity of any kind. So they transferred the idea 
to a second coming, based upon certain mis- 
understood statements of his, and confidently 
looked for within their lifetime. "When nothing 
of the kind occurred, and the expectation itself 
began to work unmanageable confusion, the 
great majority of Christians dropped the 
scheme from their system of teaching and of 
labor. But the record of it is in the New Testa- 
ment, and every great cataclysm in human 
affairs has furnished occasion, hundreds and 
hundreds of times, for a revival among restless 
and erratic believers of these long-ago aban- 
doned apocalyptic hopes and visions. 

Another kind of New Testament teaching 
that ran its natural course dealt with local 
and Oriental customs, ideas of propriety and 
habits of thought. Among these may be men- 
tioned the position of women in the churches, 
the popular superstitions as to disease, demo- 
niac possessions, dreams, visions, ecstasies 
of a supposedly spiritual character, including 
the gift of tongues, and other phenomena. 
These were real and serious problems to the 
writers of the New Testament. We deal with 


1909 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


them reverently, of course, but necessarily 
from our own point of view. They conscien- 
tiously believed that women are spiritually in- 
ferior to men. The modern male has had that 
idea beaten out of him long ago. They looked 
up to some kinds of prayer-meeting brethren as 
spiritually possessed, whom we regard, frankly ~ 
and flatly, as religious nuisances. 

Still a third kind of lost doctrine is much 
more serious. The early Christians found 
some of the Master’s teachings very difficult to 
carry out, and they quietly threw them over- 
board. A large part of the Sermon on the 
Mount, as they understood it, met this fate. 
Along some lines, the early and the medieval 
Christians were capable of great self-sacrifice. 
Most people are, if they can be convinced of 
the rewards that such sacrifice can be guar- 
anteed to bring. They could give up marriage 
for their religion without a qualm. Millions 
of people do the same to-day, to secure their 
own selfish ease or financial independence. 
They could leave the world and go into the 
desert to escape temptation or to secure op- 
portunity for pious reflection. But the worldly 


THE CHURCH EXPECTANT 191 


life has its disappointments, even in these 
days, and considering the greater hardships 
of their lot, the desert, the monastery, and 
the convent had their attractions for tired, 
worried, hopeless, and war-wearied humanity. 
It must be confessed that many of the virtues 
attributed with pious reverence to the great 
Christian saints of old seem to us much like 
foolishness. Our work would be far easier to- 
day if some of them, instead of seeking fantas- 
tic ways of exhibiting saintliness, had turned 
their attention to carrying out the simple 
precepts of Christ as to brotherly kindness, 
uprightness of daily life, forgiveness of in- 
juries, and love of the practical kind, such as 
the great Apostle wrote of so reverently and so 
beautifully in his letter to the Corinthians. 
When the Protestant Reformation came the 
leaders in the movement gave their attention 
almost entirely to the church’s sins of commis- 
sion. That was the need of the hour. To-day 
the situation is very different. The hurt that 
the modern age feels is what the church is not 
doing. The church is the trustee of a treasure 
that belongs to the world, and it is not dis- 


192 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


charging its trust. The first great need of the 
church is for postitive righteousness. For cen- 
turies it has set forth a religion whose chief 
merit is the skill with which it can run away. 
Its standard type of virtue, that it teaches to 
the Christian at all times and in all circum- 
stances, is negative; what he is not todo. The 
chief and indeed in most instances the sole re- 
ward that the church has been promising to the 
sinner is the absence of punishment. The 
things in his religion that the Christian himself 
is encouraged to rejoice over run pretty ex- 
clusively along the line of the commandments 
that he has not transgressed in the service of 
his father these many years, and the merry- 
makings with his friends that he has not been 
permitted to have. 7 

When Our Lord summed up the Command- 
ments he not only put the ten into two, to love 
God supremely and our neighbor as ourselves, 
but he did a far greater thing in changing 
obligation from the negative to the positive 
form. There are certain things, of course, that 
should not be done. Christianity recognizes — 
and acknowledges them. But the emphasis is 


THE CHURCH EXPECTANT = 193 


put upon the virtues that build up more than 
upon those that take shelter, upon the doing of 
what the world needs to have done as well as 
keeping unspotted from its contaminations. 

Church history has been to so great an extent 
a sorrowful record of blunders and contentions 
and evasions of duty that we need to exercise 
care in going over it lest we fail to appreciate 
its large majority of good points. We should 
always keep an open place in our minds for the 
evidence of a mysterious and mighty power 
that even in the darkest periods produced char- 
acters of conspicuous purity and saintliness. 
That power is the one unique and indispensable 
endowment of Christianity. Other religions 
have had their conceptions of Deity, ruling in 
righteousness, loving mercy, rewarding the 
good, and restraining the evil. Other religions 
have had saintly teachers, not comparable to 
Jesus, of course, but men of vision, at whose 
feet any one could sit with spiritual profit. 
But no other faith than ours ever had a Holy 
Spirit. 

The previous chapter brought us down to the 
end of the post-Reformation period, something 


194 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


less than a century ago. The dawn of the 
modern age can be fixed at the time when Chris- 
tians abandoned at last the ancient and 
medieval practice of punishing heresy by sec- 
ular power, or in other words ceased to kill 
one another for the love of God. Though the 
modern period is less than a century long, we 
must remember what kind of a century it has 
been. Measured in events and in growth of 
ideas rather than by years, a large part of 
church history has been made within the 
compass of two or three lifetimes. Some of 
the changes that have come are quite radical, 
Our present ideas of Bible interpretation, and 
our grouping of Christian truths and duties in 
the order of their relative importance, are 
entirely new. But the results that we obtain. 
from our modern interpretations differ very 
slightly after all from the historic theologies, 
and the old Christian truths and duties are al- 
ways the same, whether we put the emphasis 
here or there. Modernism shows no tendency 
at all to wave the red flag. No type of religious 
development that has appeared in four thou- 


THE CHURCH EXPECTANT 195 


sand years is more anxious to preserve every- 
thing in the past that is of real value. 

Other changes have come in this modern 
period that do not deal with Christian doc- 
trines but with methods of doing Christian 
work. As a rule these alterations in polity 
have been much more pronounced and radical 
than any changes in theology, and many people 
are confused because they do not distinguish 
between them. We shall consider the modern 
problems of the church, therefore, under the 
two heads: questions of the faith and questions 
of method. 

Among the positive changes in the Christian 
faith we place at the beginning the modern 
idea of freedom in the church. We do not 
think of ecclesiastical authority to-day as 
our fathers did a century ago. We hold firmly 
to the conviction that the church was not 
organized and constituted to constrain the con- 
victions of its membership in matters of spec- 
ulative opinion. In theology the church is a 
certified teacher, but like any other teacher, 
when the pupil outruns his instructor the 


196 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


church has no authority to pull him back. The 
church has but one bond of union in its mem- 
bership, and that is loyalty to Christ; which is 
a matter of spiritual conviction, and not of 
philosophy. The idea that has been held for 
centuries, that if one’s theological opinion is 
not the same as that of the majority he is not 
loyal to Christ, is a foolish and malicious per- 
version of truth. Time has demonstrated 
abundantly and convincingly that human minds 
are never going to run in the same theological 
channels. We can be loyal only to the Christ 
in whom we actually believe. How we are to 
understand his words is a matter of education, 
and education always and everywhere means 
growth and change. But whether or not we 
love and determine to serve the Christ in whom 
we believe is a matter that is fixed. It can 
change only by ceasing to exist. And that 
alone is the bond that binds Christians together 
in his church. Certified theology is necessarily 
the opinion not of the wisest but of the major- 
ity. And this is only another way of saying 
it is the opinion of mediocrity. Every thinker 


THE CHURCH EXPECTANT 197 


whose opinion differs from that of the majority 
is not a genius by any means, but whether he is 
a genius or a fool, the independent thinker has 
rights, guaranteed long ago by his Master, and 
the church cannot take them away. No real 
Christian church can put a man out of its mem- 
bership for thinking. It can excommunicate 
only for sinning. 

Only one inventor in a thousand is a genius. 
But when he comes he puts the whole world in 
his debt. Only one investigator in a thousand 
who breaks away from the established science 
of his time proves to be a success. But science 
never lays a straw in the way of the whole 
thousand, utter fools though half of them al- 
ways prove to be. For the one who does find 
the new truth makes the world rich. Modern 
religion is coming into this natural and rea- 
sonable way of treating all who work that in- 
exhaustible mine of treasure, Holy Scrip- 
ture. New light is still to break upon it. To 
insist that men shall study it only in the mental 
shackles bound upon them by their own petty 
one per cent of Christendom is the height of 


198 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


childish absurdity. And yet that is the way 
the church has been doing for centuries. Is it 
any wonder that it has ‘‘problems’’? 

Our forefathers revolted from the papal rule. 
They stood together on this one issue in suffi- 
cient numbers to make their movement historic. 
It was something like the overthrow of slavery 
in the United States of America. On a certain 
date there were here so many millions of 
slaves. An hour later there was not one. So 
men and churches withdrew from Rome. The 
separation was immediate and complete. They 
had been papists. They were papists no 
longer. 

Many a dusky fellow-citizen in America, how- 
ever, soon found that slavery even worse than 
the legal kind could be forced upon him because 
of his inability to join effectively with other 
freedmen. Protestants have found millions of 
times in the past four centuries that religious 
freedom, of the kind they had, was only a 
change of masters. One of the early transla- 
tors of Scripture declared that he would make 
English plowboys to know the word of God 
better than the Pope of Rome. His success 


THE CHURCH EXPECTANT = 199 


was so unexpectedly complete that a large part 
of English-speaking Christendom has been liv- 
ing by plowboy theologies ever since. The 
papacy of the ignorant proletariat may be quite 
as arbitrary as that of the Vatican. It speaks 
in modern days not from the Chair of Peter 
but in the language of secret conclaves, packed 
assemblies and mob rule. A century ago if 
one experienced a change of theological. opin- 
ion he was expected to change denominations. 
Such a change brings no relief to-day. Bigotry 
pays no attention to sectarian lines. The 
fences are down, and the fight is all over the 
field. The wood devours more than the sword. 
When the modern defender of the faith stands 
on the sectarian battle-line he must wear his ar- 
mor behind. In the good old days the bigot 
took his orders from denominational headquar- 
ters. Now he takes them from some organi- 
zation that has withdrawn from all church 
fellowship, and like a hollow square of soldiers 
in a day of disaster, is making a last desperate 
attempt to save the fundamentals of the faith. 

Sectarianism, by its method of organization, 
makes it possible for this same kind of limited 


200 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


intelligence to exert an abnormal influence in 
keeping theology within rigid historic lines. It 
appeals to the literal wording of the creeds in 
such an effective way that the narrowest- — 
minded saint in the prayer-meeting is able 
to dictate the terms of orthodoxy to whole 
churches of intelligent people. Against this 
condition there is a wide-spread revolt, but for 
lack of organization practically nothing has 
been accomplished in the way of relief. 

The second of these distinctly modern fea- 
tures of religion is the gradual shift to the sci- 
entific, in place of the traditional, attitude of 
mind in the study of theological problems. 
This is not the same thing as the so-called con- 
flict between science and religion, which comes 
under another head entirely. What we are con- 
sidering here is methods of research, and has 
nothing to do with the results to which research 
may lead. Differing ages of the world have 
had different ways of understanding Scripture 
and of thinking about God and about religion. 
The fact that we have the same God that the 
Hebrews had four thousand years ago does not 
force us to conceive of his ways and of our duty 


THE CHURCH EXPECTANT = 201 


to him in the exact terms of their religious phi- 
losophy. Ideas of inspiration that make us in- 
terpret the Bible in this absurd way must be 
abandoned. 

We live in an age of scientific research 
and discovery. Unconsciously our habits of 
thought on all other subjects besides natural 
science are dominated by this fact. We rest 
secure in the belief that we are in a universe 
which does not run by chance or whim or im- 
pulse. Every study that we engage in ac- 
centuates the conviction that the world on 
which we live is in the control of an intelli- 
gent power, who administers its affairs ac- 
cording to settled and reasonable principles 
that we call laws of nature. Modern thought 
igs restive under the traditional idea of a 
Deity who works by unexplainable impulse 
and does startling things merely to show that 
he can. This is very different indeed from be- 
lief in a universe that has been set going by 
blind and irresponsible forces, and runs in a 
groove from which no power at all is great 
enough to set it free. Modern ‘religious 
thought is as far from the idea of a world with- 


202 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


out God as it is from the conception of ancient 
theological fairy-land, that pictures an arbi- 
trary God moving his world by impulse as a 
child plays with a mechanical toy. 

When the army of Philip II of Spain won a 
great victory over the French on _ St. 
Lawrence’s Day, that addle-pated monarch con- 
ceived the plan of building an immense palace 
in the shape of a gridiron, to commemorate the 
battle and the fact that the martyrdom of St. 
Lawrence was by roasting on a gridiron. The 
king spent treasure by the millions building 
a gigantic structure that he did not need, in 
a place where no successor of his has ever been 
able to use it, that stands to-day as empty 
as the royal head that designed it. In the 
days of the Spanish ‘Armada people were 
not easily surprised by such an act on the part 
of a king. He had the authority, and he used 
it. They had no trouble in thinking of God in 
the same terms. He also could do whatever 
came into his mind, no matter how absurd it 
might be. Unquestionably the Old Testament 
writers had such ideas of God, and these ideas 
determined the style, at least, of their nar- 


THE CHURCH EXPECTANT = 203 


ratives. We of the present day do not ques- 
tion the power of God, nor his authority, 
nor his right to do exactly as he pleases in 
all circumstances. But we have lost the 
power to think of an infinite God who can 
do a foolish or unexplainable thing in any cir- 
cumstances. To us he is not only omnipotent 
but all-wise and perfectly reasonable. When it 
is said that he destroyed a world because the 
people he had made did not exactly suit him, 
or stopped the building of a tower for fear it 
might be a stairway into heaven for the wicked, 
we do not question the narrator’s effort to tell 
something that actually happened, even while 
we decline to follow the said narrator into all 
the minutie of his suggested reasons for the 
act. It is a part of the modern progressive 
attitude toward revealed religion. 

There are times and circumstances when we 
can conceive the best of reasons for miraculous 
events. Modern Christianity is a long way in- 
deed from the deistic position that a miracle 
never can happen. But we are equally far 
from the other extreme, that miracles must be 
happening all the time or else there is no God 


204 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


in the world. In the record of miracles in 
Scripture our thought is usually fixed upon the 
people rather than upon the assumed suspen- 
sion or violation of some natural law. And we 
often find ourselves almost unconsciously fol- 
lowing the trend of our time into the inquiry 
whether in this or that instance exactly the 
same effect would not have been produced by a 
supposed miracle as by a real one, particularly 
in view of what has come nowadays to be al- 
most a science by itself, the traceable effect of 
mental suggestions in the treatment of disease. 
And we object to the position sometimes taken 
that such a view of miracle charges Christ and 
the Apostles with conscious deception. Cer- 
tainly no one should be accused of agnosticism 
or irreverence for insisting that the modern 
brain can work best in the harness to which it 
is accustomed. 

The third of the changes that we are con- 
sidering deals directly with the interpretation 
of Scripture. A common view of the Bible 
almost universal a century or two ago, and 
still held by many people, regards it as a 
literary fetish, given and recorded by miracle 


THE CHURCH EXPECTANT = 205 


in every detail, to be implicitly received in word 
and letter even in the most imperfect copy and 
translation; every statement in it, whether 
dealing with religion or not, to be considered as 
absolutely inerrant, and of equal authority with 
all the rest. No such idea of Scripture can be 
found in the times that produced it, nor in any 
other time until after the Reformation. The 
idea belongs in the same class with other dog- 
matic assertions made about the same time con- 
cerning certain claims of natural science. 
When Galileo announced that his telescope 
showed dark, irregular spots on the sun, he 
was ridiculed even by many of his fellow- 
scientists. The spots must be on his lenses, for 
God made the sun and it is perfect. Did he not 
when his created universe was at last completed 
say that it all was very good? And when 
Kepler demonstrated the ellipticity of the 
planetary orbits, he was met by the same kind 
of reasoning. Heavenly bodies that a perfect 
God had made must move in the only perfect 
geometric figure, the circle. And, of course, 
if the mere works of his hands must be perfect, 
how can we imagine any imperfections at all 


206 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


in his own inspired Word? It must be in- 
errant. 

It is a rather thankless task, even yet, to 
point out the large number of proved errors 
and actual contradictions in Holy Writ. What- 
ever the original manuscripts may have been, 
they are hopelessly gone centuries ago. We 
have not a fragment of Bible that comes nearer 
than about three hundred years from the 
original writing. No translation of the Bible 
or of any part of it has ever been made with- 
out showing the usual uncertainties that come 
from the transfer of thought from one language 
to another. That the contents of Scripture are 
unique and stand out in a wonderful manner, 
superior to any and all other literature, is 
freely acknowledged by all scholarship that is 
worthy of the name. That these writings have 
been preserved and handed down century after 
century with extraordinary care, is a proved 
fact of history. With these causes of confi- 
dence we must be content. Everything beyond 
them is conjecture. 

Moreover, even if such a perfect original 
Bible ever existed and could be restored, it 


THE CHURCH EXPECTANT 207 


would be of interest and value only to the ex- 
pert. There are many things in this wicked 
world that keep men away from Christ. In no 
instance has an imperfect copy of Scripture 
been known to do so. If the goal of Christian 
scholarship could be reached to-morrow, and 
there should go forth from the press millions 
of Bibles absolutely faultless in record, transla- 
tion and proved fidelity to the lost autographic 
manuscripts, there is not the slightest reason to 
hope that a single human soul anywhere would 
be led to the light by such a Bible who would 
not have found it exactly as well and as soon by 
the use of the Bible that we have. That is 
not where the trouble lies in modern evangeliza- 
tion. And no fragment of remedy, for the 
troubles that Christianity actually has, can 
come along that line. 

It is difficult to state in adequate detail the 
modern view of the Bible in a single paragraph. 
It is considered to be the authentic record of 
the best religious thought of the human race 
at the various times covered by that record. 
It bears every natural mark of having been 
most carefully prepared and faithfully trans- 


208 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


mitted down the centuries to us. Its setting is 
Oriental. Its conceptions of the world of 
nature are those commonly held at the time 
when the different books were written. Its 
moral and religious teachings are progressive. 
They show improvement, century after century. 
This progress, however, was not entirely by the 
natural law of religious evolution but was much 
more rapid. What thoughtful men could learn 
of religion by experience and conference with 
one another was supplemented in the case of 
the Hebrews by direct divine communications 
given to the choice men of the race. The 
record of these communications is poetic and 
partakes of the usual extravagances of ancient 
legend. The marvel of it all is the ever old and 
ever new story of spiritual achievement, 
wrought by men of like passions and frailties 
with us, who, without pretense of perfection, 
followed consistently the best light that they 
had. And the crown of it all is Christ, the 
Shepherd of souls, the Author and Finisher of 
the one perfect and final faith for mankind. 
The world of those who wrote the Bible did 
have a butter-dish lid over it for a sky, with 


THE CHURCH EXPECTANT 209 


lanterns of various sizes hung on the under 
side. Men could believe in God and be led of 
God and still believe in such a world. It an- 
swered their purpose, and seems to have 
treated them, on the whole, much as our world 
treats us. When they went out of the world 
they passed through that sky to the Eden ly- 
ing beyond. Their heaven had some advan- 
tage over ours, in that it was more easily 
grasped by the childish intelligence. Into it 
certain disciples confidently believed they saw 
their Master go. If their conception of the 
universe had been the same as ours, what they 
saw would have been differently interpreted by 
themselves, necessarily. But, believing as 
they did, for them to try to tell their experi- 
ence in terms that would fit our universe is a 
conception as absurd as the idea of a literally 
and minutely inspired Bible. 

The mother of those people was made of a 
man’s rib, poor unfortunate, and their women 
suffered for it, clear down to the days of St. 
Paul. Our mother grew up along with man, 
and a long way ahead of him in intelligence and 
such scant virtues as the time demanded. The 


210 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


idea is admittedly less poetic, but when we con- 
sider the results the modern man has no cause 
of complaint. They were led, in wilderness 
days, by a pillar of cloud, or smoke, and of 
fire. If Moses was as wise as we think he was, 
it is easy to explain that phenomenon by 
natural laws. But the great fact behind the 
story, of divine leadership by raising up such 
a man, will never lose its attractiveness and 
its power by dropping a miracle out of the 
narrative. Their prophets came and told them 
of things that were going to happen. Ours can 
do the same, for the great moral laws that con- 
trol peoples and governments, laws that the 
prophets constantly appealed to, are as fixed 
and as unchangeable as the laws of the light- 
ning and the rain. 

Another change from post-Reformation to 
modern religious thought is less distinct than 
these that we have considered, in that it is not 
a change of conviction at all but only of the 
way in which the conviction comes. Men of the 
Nicene Age, the Renaissance, and the Reforma- 
tion believed in an all-sufficient Saviour, whose 
ability to avert for them the evils that they so 


THE CHURCH EXPECTANT = 211 


greatly feared came from his mysterious in- 
carnation, from the atonement that he wrought, 
and from the fact that he bore our sins and the 
weight of divine wrath against us because of 
our sins, in his own person. They believed in 
a divine Saviour who brought a mysterious 
grace and power to mankind through strict 
obedience to an arbitrary world program for 
the salvation of the elect. Modern Christian- 
ity has no quarrel with this kind of philosophy, 
if it is to be considered purely as a philosophy 
and not as an interpretation. We think of the 
same Saviour, the same kind of Saviour, pro- 
ducing the same result exactly. But we think 
of the greatness of his power as coming from 
the perfect harmony of his will with the will of 
God. How he obtained that harmony, whether 
from some mystic gift of being or by treading 
in perfection the same road that we imperfectly 
tread toward our own few and scattered vir- 
tues, is a question that modern religion hardly 
feels itself competent to decide. We only know 
that his type of virtue could not satisfy him 
unless he could find a way to share its benefits 
with us. It is vicarious not so much by ar- 


212 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


bitrary divine decree as in the nature of the 
case. Christ, being what he was, necessarily 
had that kind of love toward all mankind. 

In the Christ of the Gospels there is every 
possible evidence of a constant and an un- 
broken consciousness of communion with the 
Father. It is sufficient to account for every- 
thing that he did and for everything that he 
was. We can find not the slightest evidence of 
any discrepancy between his speech and his 
thought, between what he actually was and 
what he always showed himself to be. This 
alone would make reasonable every hope that 
humanity has so extravagantly built upon him 
for nineteen hundred years. His sincerity was 
so absolute and so plain that it filled his disci- 
ples with awe. It fills us with awe to-day, and 
with a consciousness that in him we have access 
to the Father, as complete and as satisfying as 
anything that ever came in the rapt experiences 
of medieval saints. What St. Paul saw on the 
highway to Damascus was the vision of an 
Oriental in the first century. The Christ whom 
we find in Scripture is of the twentieth century. 


THE CHURCH EXPECTANT 213 


But our vision of him is quite as wonderful in 
its equally marvelous and equally transforming 
effect. 

The present age has all the perplexities that 
real Bible study has felt for centuries in the 
efforts to reconcile the diverse and contra- 
dictory statements referring to the birth of 
Christ as a descendant of David, and of a 
virgin mother whose husband’s descent, but not 
her own, is elaborately traced. This is a ques- 
tion to be decided, if it ever is decided, by care- 
ful and painstaking research, and not by ig- 
norant vituperation. Questions of the conflict- 
ing phenomena reported in the several accounts 
of his resurrection on the third day are of a 
similar character. Beyond their joyful recog- 
nition of him, everything that those disciples 
try to tell us only increases our confusion. We 
grope in equal perplexity with the Nicene 
bishops in our efforts to visualize the words of 
the fourth Gospel and of Paul as to the previ- 
ous condition of him who counted it not rob- 
bery to be equal with God. The one clear con- 
ception of the Christ that modern faith holds 


214 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


with all the pristine freshness of Pentecostal 
experience is the mystery and the charm of a 
perfectly ordered life. 

The fifth of these changed conceptions, and 
the last one we shall consider, refers to the 
life hereafter. So little is said upon this sub- 
ject in modern preaching, as compared with the 
conjectural and confusing voluminousness of 
what used to be said, that many people fear 
lest religion is losing its belief in a future 
world. Nothing can be farther from the truth. 
It is the survival of old views rather than the 
teaching of new concepts that caused the per- 
functory and superstitious childishness that so 
many army chaplains tell us they found in 
place of religion among the young men under 
their charge, and that made them, when face to 
face with death, look over into the future with 
such a sense of unreality. The emphasis to- 
day is put upon the deathless quality of all that 
is best and sweetest in life itself, rather than 
upon the mere endlessness of existence here- 
after. It is a revival of interest in the teach- 
ings of the fourth Gospel. Eternal life is not 


THE CHURCH EXPECTANT = 215 


the mere transfer of being. It is to know God, 
and Jesus Christ whom he hath sent. 

These five points we have called changes in 
the faith, in the sense that they affect our con- 
ceptions of religion itself. We turn our at- 
tention in closing this discussion to certain 
problems of a different kind. They are 
changes not in ideas of religion, but in convic- 
tions as to how any religion ought to be taught 
and propagated. One of the acknowledged 
and unquestioned evils bequeathed to us by the 
immediate past stands out conspicuously above 
all the others. It is the divided condition of 
‘Protestant Christianity. Tragic events of re- 
cent date have brought this problem to the 
front, even among those who have hitherto re- 
garded the divided state as one of the inevitable 
features of real religious liberty. Not without 
reason, a very wide-spread impression exists 
that in the year 1914 Christianity met its 
supreme test in all the centuries, and failed. 
Nobody questions what the cause of the failure 
was. War means concentrated opinion as well 
as effort, and cannot be dealt with by pygmy 


216 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


convictions of individual rights. Whatever 
differences of opinion exist as to just where 
each element of the blame should be placed, 
nobody can question that this war, above all 
others, showed its character from the begin- 
ning so very plainly that Christianity was 
bound to speak out against it. And the church 
said never a word. Catholic fought with 
Catholic, Protestant with Protestant; and one 
side, both Catholic and Protestant, drew in the 
Mohammedan to fight against Christian breth- 
ren on the other side. The pitiful thread- 
bareness of any claim that religious divisions 
rest upon convictions so precious as not to be 
touched was never more plainly shown in the 
whole history of sectarianism. 

It was not that the church tried to do some- 
thing and failed. She did not even try. It 
was not that religion exhausted itself in talk 
without action. It did not even talk. And yet 
Christian people everywhere recognized the 
gravity of the crisis. The Interchurch World 
Movement, the wildest scheme of union ever 
hatched outside of a madhouse, was eagerly 
welcomed and liberally sustained right up to 


THE CHURCH EXPECTANT = 217 


the day of its inevitable collapse. People want 
union. The world will never be made Chris- 
tian until they demand united effort of some 
practical kind and get it. 

It was providential that Protestantism left a 
divided church. Mankind was not ready at 
that time to exercise real religious freedom 
with safety. To give to the Protestant church 
of the sixteenth century the power to perpetu- 
ate in a united and effective way such religious 
convictions as then prevailed would have been 
a disaster. Religious liberty has had to come 
by the hard law of nature, the elimination of the 
unfit. But at last itis here. The Reformation 
broke up the existing Christian unity by break- 
ing away from the superstitions upon which 
that unity was founded, and thereby prepared 
the way for a Christian unity without supersti- 
tion which is yet to come. Moses, for the hard- 
ness of the people’s hearts, suffered them to 
put away their wives, with a few humane re- 
strictions. It was the best that could be done 
until a people more fit for permanent marriage 
could be developed. God permitted his people 
to separate in a time when separation was bet- 


218 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


ter than constant turmoil. But the condition 
certainly was not intended to be permanent. 
When the people can be trusted to carry out his 
permanent plan, there ean be no doubt that the 
way will be opened. 

We may consider as the second changed con- 
viction, in regard to methods of propagating 
Christianity, a restiveness, almost equal to 
that which is felt over a divided Christendom, 
on the subject of religious education. One of 
the first tasks undertaken by American Chris- 
tianity was the founding of colleges. Our 
fathers were poor in this world’s goods, and 
few of them had obtained a liberal education. 
But they insisted upon providing liberally for 
an educated ministry. That is what our great 
institutions of learning down to the time of the 
Revolution were founded for. The most con- 
spicuous of all the peculiar American develop- 
ments of Christianity in later years has been 
the repudiation of its own universities and 
colleges by the church, and the insistence upon 
an uneducated, or at least a throttle-educated, 
ministry among large sections of Protestant- 
ism. A condition of widespread suspicion 


THE CHURCH EXPECTANT 219 


against liberal education exists among those 
who claim to be spiritual leaders in our 
time. The church does not stand at the sum- 
mit of the intellectual life of the community 
as it did in colonial days, but at a point so much 
lower that it looks upon the young people in 
our colleges as about the most hopeless class 
to reach with its kind of gospel in the whole 
community. Even if they were Christians of 
the conventional type before going to college, 
they ‘‘lose their faith’? while there; which 
means, of course, that they lose certain ideas of 
religion that were taught them in their home 
churches. The modern church is confident that 
it can cope with youthful wickedness, but not 
with youthful quest for knowledge. 

Another aspect of the same condition is the 
self-complacency with which so much of our 
conventional church life regards its type of 
Sunday-school instruction; a system of train- 
ing unlike anything else in the world, heathen 
or Christian, that ever was devised. There is 
a famous Mohammedan school where nothing 
is taught but the Koran. The curriculum is re- 
duced to a mathematical line, without breadth 


220 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


or thickness. But it must be said of these 
young bigots that they do learn the Koran. 
They can pass an exhaustive examination on 
the Mohammedan book when they are through. 
Our children learn nothing that can give them 
any help in meeting the inevitable religious in- 
quiries of the time in which they live. 

In secular educaton, which in most of the 
States of the Union is carefully separated from 
religion, our children have every advantage. 
They have modern and well-equipped schools. 
Their teachers must be specially trained. 
There is the enthusiasm of numbers, the stimu- 
lus of ambition to excel, the encouragement that 
comes from the community’s interest in them, 
and the consciousness of attainment as they 
pass from one grade to ‘another. Our school 
system cannot be called perfect, but it is con- 
sistent. It is built upon the wholesome Ameri- 
can idea of doing practical things in an 
effective way. 

Qn Sundays these same children are sep- 
arated from most of their companions by a 
prejudice of which they have some vague and 
startling notions but no real information. We 


THE CHURCH EXPECTANT = 221 


have inherited a sectarianism of which we are 
so heartily ashamed that we hesitate to discuss 
it with our children. They are gathered into 
ill-adapted quarters and by way of instruction 
are talked to for half an hour by well-meaning 
amateurs who could not pass a child’s examina- 
tion upon the subjects they are supposed to 
teach. The author is not here drawing upon 
information at second hand. A large part of 
his own life-work has been directly along these 
lines, in church connections that insured as 
high-grade intelligence in teachers and as lib- 
eral support financially as can be found in 
America. He asserts without fear of success- 
ful contradiction that more than nine out of 
ten children of intelligent Protestant Ameri- 
cans are not religiously educated at all. What- 
ever ideas on the subject they actually get, they. 
pick up among themselves. 

Some of these children go to college and lose 
their faith. What had they to lose? Others 
remain at home and keep their faith. Where 
do they keep it? Is it a matter to be wondered 
at that here in America, among people of 
social position and of some pretensions to in- 


222 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


telligence, there is the finest recruiting-ground 
for fool religions and nag-ridden schemes of 
healing that the whole world can show? 

A large part of the success of religion a 
century or more ago must be attributed to the 
fact that it was stimulated and shored up by 
public interest and by many pious customs that 
have fallen into utter decay. Children were 
taken to church regularly and conscientiously 
by their parents. There was no other way to 
respectability, and usually nowhere else to go. 
Conditions are very different to-day. No sign 
of the time is more significant and ominous 
than this, that religion, real religion itself, 
must be made so interesting that people of all 
ages will come to church for the sake of re- 
ligion and nothing else. ‘Practically every- 
thing else has been tried in the modern church 
and has dismally failed. 

A small but significant part of the educa- 
tional program bears upon the preparation of 
young men for the Christian ministry. We 
have hundreds of theological schools in 
America, founded expressly to propagate par- 
tial and controversial types of doctrine. 


THE CHURCH EXPECTANT = 223 


They are known by sectarian names, supported 
by sectarian funds, and the dead hand of the 
past is upon them. Those who teach in them 
are subjected to denominational tests somewhat 
after the order of thumb-screws and hot plow- 
shares, and in a few of the minor kinds, so 
deadly is the spiritual atmosphere of the time, 
the instructors are required to resubscribe to 
the doctrinal standards at least once a year. 
In some instances this policy has succeeded. 
No one could ask a more microscopic and key- 
hole-searching type of theological instruction 
than some of these schools of the prophets can 
show. But it was written long ago that the 
entrance of God’s word giveth light. It is an 
exceedingly difficult thing to make the Bible 
teach foolishness in an investigating age. It 
has come to be that the least encumbered type 
of religious thinking in the modern world is 
found usually in theological seminaries. They 
are built upon a scheme of doctrinal bigotry so 
palpably and utterly absurd that it has defeated 
its own end. We tremble to think what is go- 
ing to happen when some people in our churches 
discover the fact that a real Bible is taught in 


224 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


a real way in so many of our theological schools. 

The third among the evidences of a changed 
opinion in modern days has reference to the 
program of evangelization. No living church 
ean be bound down to any one type of propa- 
ganda. Provision must be made in an age like 
ours to reach not only the people of widely 
divergent natural tastes and degrees of cul- 
ture, of all grades of education and of experi- 
ences in reading and discussing modern prob- 
lems, but also of every previous condition of 
religious servitude. The church in future will 
depend a great deal more upon the proper re- 
ligious training of the young than upon revival- 
ism of any kind, but it is neither probable nor 
desirable that special efforts to reach the un- 
churched people in a land like ours will be 
diminished but rather greatly increased in any 
advance movement that may be inaugurated. 
The inexcusable extravagances of this kind of 
work in the past have created a most un- 
fortunate prejudice against special efforts of 
the kind that may be called genuine religious 
awakenings. Modern communities need to be 
shaken out of their apathy by any reasonable 


THE CHURCH EXPECTANT = 225 


efforts and methods that can help in turning 
the thoughts of this careless and materialistic 
generation to the eternal realities of life. But 
we must frankly recognize the fact that among 
all the manifestations of religion that this un- 
fortunate age of ours has had to endure, the 
revivalism of the past century or so has been 
the very worst. The vulgarity that Christian 
people have been willing to submit to in this 
kind of work has had a great deal to do with 
the unfavorable attitude of this age toward 
religion. Coarseness and indecency have no 
place in the preaching of the gospel. 

Fortune and fame await the colleges, schools 
and publishing-houses that work out practical 
and timely courses of instruction for Sunday- 
school teachers, choristers and managers. 
Christianity in these days is only seeking to do 
what the Apostles did in their day, and the 
Reformers in theirs: it is trying to make in- 
herited religious convictions square with the 
facts of life as our generation understands 
them. We are not attempting to change the 
Christian faith in any way whatsoever, but we 
do want to substitute developed judgments of 


226 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


it for outworn opinions. With all the em- 
phasis that the present conditions call for upon 
educational means and methods, we must never 
forget that in all ages of history no great re- 
ligious advance has ever come by increased 
clarity in understanding religion apart from 
the most intimate and vital union with emo- 
tional and moral forces. Emotion without in- 
tellect does produce a certain kind of religion, 
but intellect without emotion produces nothing. 
The wholesome union of the two is our practical 
goal. It is as necessary as the union of love 
and righteousness, of faith and works. Only 
in such a way can we propagate a religion that 
measures up to the need of our time. 

We never should have had a fourth Gospel, 
with its fathomless mines of spiritual treasure, 
if the author of it had not possessed the cour- 
age to break away from the over-emotional 
and under-intellectual type of religion that 
shows so clearly in the earlier chapters of the 
Book of the Acts and elsewhere in the New 
Testament. Nothing that ever was written is 
more genuinely and thoroughly spiritual than 
the first Epistle of John. It is the perfect type 


THE CHURCH EXPECTANT = 227 


of emotionalism, held under absolute mental 
control. It speaks of a love that has power to 
gain the world and to hold the world, but has 
nothing in common with extravagance or fanat- 
icism. It is the body, the soul, and the spirit 
of religion, each in full and well-balanced ac- 
cord with the other. The appeal that the ex- 
pectant church is becoming ready to make to 
the modern world is like the very City of God 
itself. The length, the breadth, and the height 
of it are equal. 

There is a vast difference between living in 
the thrill of a genuine religious awakening and 
trying to reproduce the effects of it when the 
fires have burned out. The Christian faith of 
the present hour is neither dead nor dying. It 
has possessions—material, intellectual and 
spiritual—such as the faith has never had be- 
fore in any age of the world, even that of the 
Apostles. What the church is longing for to- 
day is one of those mighty movements of the 
Spirit of God, coming no man can tell when or 
how, but which no man can mistake when it does 
come, that will take the things of Christ and 
show them to us with new and wonderful power. 


228 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY? 


We cannot obtain this power by looking at the 
past or by copying the methods of the past. 
The Holy Spirit is creative and not imitative, 
even of his own past victories. We should take 
what the past has taught us, of course, and 
should use it. We should hold fast that which 
is good. But we should be ready also, with 
eager willingness, to be led into whatsoever of 
new and greater good God may have in store 
for us in the days of the widest opportunity 
the church of Christ has ever known, the time 
that lies immediately before us. 


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